Truth Commissions after Economic Crises: Political Learning or Blame Game?

This paper addresses an important, but understudied, aspect of the recent Great Recession in Europe: the institutional strategies political elites deploy after economic crises to address issues of accountability and policy learning. Why do political elites in certain countries use these mechanisms to score political points against opponents, whist others genuinely seek to learn lessons from past policy failures? We compare three Truth Commissions (TC) in Iceland, Greece and Ireland. We identify two types of political learning – institutional and instrumental – related to the establishment of TC. We argue that political elites in countries with higher pre-crisis levels of trust in institutions and public transparency are more likely to establish economic TC quickly. This is the institutional logic of learning. The instrumental logic of learning, in contrast, leads new governments interested in apportioning blame to their predecessors to establish such commissions.