Transitional Justice and Political Stability after Human Rights Abuses.

New regimes in countries with a history of human rights abuses are faced with an important choice of how to proceed vis-a-vis those responsible for the abuses. Moving against these culpable groups requires the enactment of specific transitional justice mechanisms such as transitional trials, political purges, and truth commissions. Previous research has proposed a myriad of arguments for and against these potential targeting strategies. While they are often promoted as necessary for a country to re-establish stable governance, some suggest that they may have the opposite effect of undermining political stability. The relationship between these variables has not yet been systematically tested, making it difficult to resolve the debate. This paper addresses this gap by using quantitative data on all 165 regime transitions that occurred from 1980-2004 in which serious human rights abuses were committed under a previous regime. The results show that transitional justice measures are generally correlated with greater political stability, and that transitional trials in particular are positively and robustly related to greater political stability and improved democratic governance. Truth commissions and political purges appear to have relatively little effect, suggesting that policymakers interested in attaining political stability focus their efforts on trials rather than other forms of transitional justice. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]