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Populism and transitional justice: talking the talk without walking the walk

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Abstract

The growing success of populist parties around the world has generated heated debates about memory politics and the legacies of authoritarian regimes. As the case of Hungary shows, however, the weaponization of history to justify a populist division of society does not necessarily translate into the approval of Transitional Justice (TJ) laws. Does the growing presence of populist actors in parliaments have any impact on the adoption of TJ laws? We answer this question by analyzing a unique dataset of 27 third wave democracies from Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America, between 1975 and 2020. We show that populist parties ‘talk the talk’ but do not ‘walk the walk’: the higher their presence in parliament, the lower the chances of the approval of TJ laws. This remains true even when parliaments show a strong presence of parties that normally approve a higher number of TJ laws because historically they opposed the previous authoritarian regime.

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Notes

  1. It should be noted that there was almost unanimity among our experts in classifying parties as either ASP or OSP, including Fidezs. Regarding the category of Semi-Opposition Successor Party, it should be noted that it produced the most disagreement among the experts. Nevertheless, we decided to keep this category in our analysis since it is relevant in a few of the countries included.

  2. To identify cases of successful democratization, we used V-Dem’s Regimes of the World dataset and only considered cases that were coded as electoral democracies for at least 5 years and two consecutive elections.

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Funding

Funding was provided by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (Grant No. PDTC/SOC-OC/28524/2017), Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Grant No. PTDC/CPO-CPO/30730/2017).

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  1. Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, Av. Prof. Aníbal Bettencourt 9, 1600-189, Lisbon, Portugal

    António Luís Dias, Luca Manucci & Filipa Alves Raimundo

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  1. António Luís Dias
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Correspondence to António Luís Dias.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Table 2.

Table 2 Summary results of cox regression analysis for three models
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Dias, A.L., Manucci, L. & Raimundo, F.A. Populism and transitional justice: talking the talk without walking the walk. Acta Polit (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-023-00307-5

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