(65%) of these regimes were Military-Individual regimes. It is also evident that were greater
frequencies in the use of Amnesties, Truth Commissions and Domestic Criminal Proceedings
in countries in transition from Individual authoritarian regimes.
As was found for the Civilian-Military contrast, the freedom status of these countries, 2006 to
2014, showed a similar distribution for both types of regime.
Finally, and for both sets of comparison, the use of transitional justice mechanisms, pre and
post-transition, was examined.
Table 20: Transitional justice mechanisms compared; Pre and Post-transition
Civilian
Military
Institutional
Individual
Pre-transition
1.9 (0.9)
1.8 (0.8)
2 (0.96)
1.7 (0.74)
Post-transition
2.8 (1.2)**
3.1 (1.4)***
2.6 (1.21)*
3.2 (1.5) ***
19
As can be seen from Table 20, the increase in transitional justice mechanisms, from pretransition to post-transition, was significant for all forms of regime, save that the effect was
the least for regimes that were based in civilian-institutional forms. The largest difference,
pre and post-transition, was for military and individual authoritarian regimes.
There was a very significant difference between Civilian and Military regimes in the
longevity of the former, generally lasting more than twice as long as the latter 20, but this is
simply explained by the presence of former communist regimes – classified as authoritarian
by Polity IV, but the same trend was observed for the contrast between Institutional as
opposed to Individual types of regimes, albeit not as strong a trend.21
4.5 Conclusions on quantitative findings
As Olsen, Payne and Reiter (2010) point out, quantitative analysis of transitional justice can
lead to new insights that are rarely available from the study of individual mechanisms, and
the ITJDBP data is a considerable help here. The question at issue here was an examination
of transitional justice mechanisms in a pre-transitional setting, in countries making the
transition from authoritarian rule to democracy. Obviously an implicit question here is
whether the use of such mechanisms made any difference to the transition, and, relatedly,
whether the use of such mechanisms, post-transition, also made any difference.
Perhaps the first conclusion is perhaps not very comforting. There does not seem to be much
change in the status of the countries included in this analysis: as was seen (Figure 1),
countries have maintained their status over time, and whether a country was Free, Partly
Free, or Not Free according to the Freedom House Democracy Index, the status of these
countries has remained largely the same over the period 2006 to 2014. As many
commentators have pointed out, democracy is under assault (Carothers. 2002; Diamond.
2008; Fukayama et al. 2014), and one evident lesson is that transitions are highly complex
and very individual: we have learned that one shoe does not fit all; and that each country
must chart a course suitable to its own context.
19
* p=0.05; **p=0.01; *** p=0.001
20
Civilian vs. Military; (Mean, 32 years vs.14 years); p=0.0001.
Institutional vs. Individual; (Mean, 18 years vs. 27 years); p=0.06).
21
22
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