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ID:
179269
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| Summary/Abstract |
Many democracies start with aspirations to rectify wrongs that occurred under the preceding authoritarian regime. To what extent can a new democracy address political repression and violence by dictators, given that key actors from the past often remain politically powerful? What determines the success of those efforts? We construct and analyze a novel data set on 102 retrials of allegedly fabricated espionage cases in South Korea to explain the political conditions under which a democratic judiciary reverses past errors. We find that the time since democratization, a leader’s policy drive for transitional justice, and the degree of fabrication in the past all affect retrial acquittal rates. We also find that judges who were appointed under the authoritarian regime are less likely to nullify past verdicts. Furthermore, national survey analysis suggests that the overturning of past fabricated verdicts significantly enhances citizens’ overall trust in the judiciary.
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| 2 |
ID:
171202
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| Summary/Abstract |
In this paper, we study how political parties react to democratic transitions. We find that the structure of legislators’ social networks plays a critical role in shaping their political interactions during the transition period, and consequently, the post-transition party systems that emerge. We focus on the Korean case, where the incumbent authoritarian party merged with one of its pro-democracy opponents to create a powerful and enduring conservative party under democratic rule. Using a novel individual-level dataset on all legislative members during the transition, we find that the merger was facilitated by dense social networks linking members of the merged parties, which increased trust across the parties and reduced the difficulty of a merger. Conversely, we find that the paucity of ties linking pro-democracy parties hindered their long-term cooperation, despite their shared ideologies and policy goals. The study complements existing theories by providing a network-based explanation for the weakly institutionalized political party system that has characterized Korean politics since democratization.
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