Tolerating Mistakes: How Do Popular Perceptions of Procedural Fairness Affect Demand for Transitional Justice?

• Published in: The Journal of conflict resolution Vol. 56; no. 3; pp. 490 - 515
• Main Author: Nalepa, Monika
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.06.2012; SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
• Subjects: Accounting; Acquittals; Authoritarianism; Citizens; Communism; Conflict resolution; Data collection; Democracy; Democratization; Equity; Fairness; Justice; Perceptions; Poland; Postcommunism; Postcommunist Societies; Preferences; Psychologists; Public opinion; Public opinion polls; Secret police; Socialist states; Studies; Threat; Transitional justice; Voting Behavior; Voting behaviour; Hungary; Poland; Czech Republic; procedural fairness; transitional justice; false acquittal; false conviction; postcommunist Europe; lustration
• ISSN: 0022-0027; 1552-8766
• DOI: 10.1177/0022002712438343

How do perceptions of procedural fairness shape the preferences that citizens have for transitional justice (TJ) in postauthoritarian countries? This article uses original opinion poll data collected in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to investigate this question. It shows that differences in the demand for TJ are explained by how citizens perceive whether the TJ process commits errors—that is, whether the innocent are condemned (falsely convicted) or the guilty are exonerated (falsely acquitted). This is so even after accounting for threat perceptions of former autocrats and voting behavior. After comparing the ways in which citizens' perceptions of errors in the TJ process shape their demand for lustration in the three postcommunist countries, the author discusses the implications of these findings for scholars of democratic consolidation, social psychologists, and policy makers designing TJ systems.