Transitional Justice and the Problem of Democratic Decline
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it