Beets or Watermelons? Clientelism and the Appropriate Transitional Justice Mechanism

In this paper I offer a theory of how transitional justice (TJ) affects the possibility of developing clientelistic linkages between politicians and voters and illustrate it with data from ten Post-Communist countries. First, I present a general hypothesis about the relationship between the frequency of TJ laws and the level of clientelism in each country. Next, I develop a more nuanced argument according to which the effectiveness of TJ to clear a country’s elites from authoritarian networks depends on the type of communism, it is recovering from. Specifically, communist states that relied on clandestine collaborators to stay in power require lustration to purge their political elites of authoritarian networks. Communist states that persisted thanks to open collaboration, such as membership in mass communist parties to stay in power, require decommunization to purge themselves of former communist networks. The distinction between clandestine and open communist networks partly overlaps with Kitschelt’s distinction between patrimonial communism on the one hand and national accommodative and bureaucratic communism on the other. To illustrate and, in a preliminary fashion, to test my theoretical hypotheses I use an original Transitional Justice database in combination with the Democracy and Accountability Linkages Project Database.