Transitional Justice and the Problem of Democratic Decline
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT∞ When transitional justice emerged as a field of practice amid the third wave of democracy, many hoped it would reinforce the rules and norms that prevent democratic decline. However, over half of all the democracies that transitioned from autocracy or experienced civil war in the last half-century have since undergone backsliding or breakdown. Is transitional justice partly to blame? This article theorizes six ways that transitional justice might contribute to democratic decline, or alternatively, to democratic progress. It then analyzes data from 118 democratic spells in 89 countries spanning 1970 to 2023 to evaluate which hypotheses are plausible. In line with theories focused on endogenous change, the findings suggest that transitional justice is actually associated with stronger electoral and judicial institutions, which reinforces the guardrails of democracy against autocratic reversion. Yet, while transitional justice might help prevent full democratic breakdown, it does not hinder democratic backsliding, particularly that which is driven by government restrictions on civic association.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".