Table 5: Post-transition justice mechanisms No. % Amnesties 44 74.6 Truth Commission 20 33.9 Domestic Criminal Prosecutions 53 89.8 7 11.9 Foreign criminal prosecutions 11 18.6 Reparations 14 23.7 Vettings 20 33.9 6 10.2 Civil Trials Customary justice It is immediately evident that all forms of transitional justice increase markedly in frequency once a transition takes place, as can be seen in Table 4. What is of interest is the significant decline in the frequency of amnesties, supporting the view that amnesty is the dominant mode of building the infrastructure for a transition, creating impunity for the excesses of authoritarian governments (Olsen, Payne & Reiter. 2010). Table 6: Comparison of frequency of transitional justice mechanisms (Pre and Post-Transition) PreTransition Amnesties Truth Commission Domestic Criminal Prosecutions Civil Trials Foreign criminal prosecutions Reparations Vettings PostTransition 86.4% 74.6% 8.5% 33.9%** 72.9% 89.8%* 1.7% 11.9%* 6.8% 1.7% 6.8% 18.6%* 23.7%** 33.9%** There are significant increases in the frequency of most of the other transitional justice mechanisms. Thus, and unsurprisingly, the frequency of use of all transitional justice mechanisms, amnesties and foreign criminal prosecutions apart, are significantly more frequent in the post-transition period. In particular, the overall frequency of all transitional justice mechanisms in the post-transition period was highly significant, statistically speaking, with these mechanisms doubling on average.11 This is not a very surprising finding overall. All of these countries were selected because they were formerly authoritarian regimes with histories of gross human rights violations, and hence it is of direct interest to see whether they have become democratic in the post-transition period. The question of whether the pretransitional justice processes were influential here is left for a later section. Overall, there is not much that is surprising in these results, and they have been well explained in previous research (Olsen, Payne & Reiter. 2010). It is unsurprising that there would be greater frequency in the use of transitional justice mechanisms once an authoritarian regime has been removed from power, but is also interesting in how these regimes do disappear. In the post-1990 epoch, negotiations became the most frequent mode of change, providing support for the Huntington thesis. The relationship between the type of authoritarian regime and the type of transition were largely negatively significant, apart from 11 ** Significant at 0.0001 level; ** Significant at 0.01 level; * Significant at 0.05 level. 15