shifted from authoritarian rule to democracy between 1970 and 2004 (Reiter & Fishman.
2016).
The data was then reduced to 58 countries by taking a cut-off date of only those countries
that had made transitions since 1988. The rationale here was that 1988 marked the end of the
Cold War, the beginning of serious revolts against Soviet rule, and the beginning of more
serious-minded adherence to human rights treaties and conventions internationally, as well as
the increasing insistence on human rights observance and rule of law in development
assistance. The changes in Eastern Europe had a marked effect throughout the world, and
removed the easy position for the Non-Aligned Movement countries of playing off the East
against the West, with the persistence of many highly authoritarian regimes tolerated by
either of these two major power blocs in return for political support. For countries had more
than one transition, we took the most recent year of transition that fell within the selected
time period, 1988 to 2004.
The ITJDBP data covers a number of fields dealing with the type of authoritarian regime, the
type of transition, the transitional mechanisms applied pre-transition, and the transitional
mechanisms applied post-transition. To these fields were added the overall scores and the
sub-category scores from the Freedom House Democracy Index for the period 2006 to 2014.
These were added in order to gain some indication of the democratic status for the selected
countries since it is implicit in this study that some estimate can be made of the contribution
of transitional justice mechanisms, both pre and post-transition, to the development of
democracy. The final set of data fields were as follows:
PRE-TRANSITION
Transition type
Regime type
Authoritarian Regime Type
Civil war
Civilian-individual
Civilian-institutional
Military-individual
Military-institutional
Authoritarian Regime Length
(no. of years)
State created
Collapse
Domestic overthrow
Emergence from civil war
Foreign overthrow
Negotiated- regime led
Negotiated- opposition led
Transitional justice mechanisms
Amnesty
Truth Commission
Domestic criminal prosecutions
Foreign criminal prosecutions
Civil trials
Reparations
Vetting
Customary justice
Transitional justice
mechanisms
Amnesty
Truth Commission
Domestic
criminal
prosecutions
Foreign criminal prosecutions
Civil trials
Reparations
Vetting
POST-TRANSITION
Freedom House Democracy Index Score
(2006 to 2014)
Free, Partly Free, Not Free
Political Rights
Civil Liberties
Electoral Process
Political Pluralism and Participation
Functioning of Government
Freedom of Expression and Belief
Associational and Organizational Rights
Rule of Law
Personal Autonomy and Individual Rights
The edited data set was then converted from text into fields in an Excel spread sheet. Binary
scores for each of the above were then created in a separate spread sheet, thus giving
frequency scores for each field, and allowing comparison of the selected countries. There
12
Select target paragraph3
Add to table of contents