Dictators and their subjects: authoritarian attitudinal effects and legacies

This introductory essay outlines the key themes of the special issue on the long-term impact of autocracies on the political attitudes and behavior of their subjects. Here, we highlight several important areas of theoretical and empirical refinements, which can provide a more nuanced picture of the process through which authoritarian attitudinal legacies emerge and persist. First, we define the nature of attitudinal legacies and their driving mechanisms, developing a framework of competing socialization. Second, we use the competing socialization framework to explain two potential sources of heterogeneity in attitudinal and behavioral legacies: varieties of institutional features of authoritarian regimes, which affect the nature of regime socialization efforts; and variations across different subgroups of (post-)authoritarian citizens, which reflect the nature and strength of alternative socialization efforts. This new framework can help us to better understand contradictory findings in this emerging literature as well as set a new agenda for future research

Trying perpetrators: denazification trials and support for democracy in West Germany

We study the effects of transitional justice (TJ) programs that punish large numbers of human rights violators through the lenses of social psychology theories on how individuals respond to punishment in allocative situations, including how defendants in court trials evaluate their verdicts. We analyze subnational variation in procedures and outcomes of denazification trials in West Germany during 1946-47. Consistently with established findings in social psychology, we find that procedural justice and the distributive fairness of outcomes can compensate for the anti-democratic attitudinal effects of being a defendant in a TJ trial. We also find evidence that procedural justice influences the democratic attitudes of family members of TJ defendants. The study has implications for contemporary cases of TJ programs that affect large numbers of perpetrators

Whither Democracy? The Politics of Dejection in the 2000 Romanian Elections

This paper analyzes the reasons for the clear victory of the leftist Party of Social Democracy (PDSR) and its presidential candidate, Ion Iliescu in the 2000 Romanian elections, as well as the strong showing of the extremist Greater Romania Party (PRM) and its leader Corneliu Vadim Tudor. Based on an analysis of voter surveys, the paper argues that the rise of the extreme right does not reflect a radicalization of the Romanian electorate but rather a protest vote against the perceived corruption and incompetence of the country's political elite in the last decade. The paper concludes with implications for the future of democracy in the former communist countries in and around the region

Public Goods or Political Pandering: Evidence from IMF Programs in Latin America and Eastern Europe

This article uses empirical evidence from Latin American and East European International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs from 1982 to 2001 to analyze the nature and the extent of preferential lending practices by the IMF. Unlike prior work, which focused on narrow political interference from large IMF member states, the present analysis differentiates between such narrow interests and the Fund's international systemic responsibilities, which may justify the preferential treatment of systemically important countries to prevent broader regional or global crises. The empirical results suggest that systemically based deviations from technocratic impartiality predominate in situations—such as the Latin American debt crisis—where international financial stability is under serious threat. Under such circumstances, economically important countries do receive preferential IMF treatment but only when experiencing severe crises, while narrow “private goods” considerations are largely sidelined. When systemic threats are less immediate—such as in Latin America and Eastern Europe in the 1990s—IMF favoritism reflects a more volatile and region-specific mix of private and public considerations in line with the changing interests of powerful Western nations in the developing world