Lustration, Transitional Justice, and Social Trust in Post-Communist Countries. Repairing or Wresting the Ties that Bind?

Abstract

Interpersonal trust in post-communist societies is particularly low, and is often cited as an impediment to democratic consolidation. One way in which countries in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have tried to build trust is through transitional justice measures, particularly lustration or vetting policies. There is a direct relationship postulated between lustration, transitional justice, and social trust building. This paper tests this assumption by examining the impact of both targeted lustration and broader transitional justice programmes on social trust. The study finds there is a divergent impact of lustration on trust, both building particularised trust in social institutions and undermining generalised interpersonal trust.

Notes

¹ ‘Fukuyama a szükséges közbizalom’, Nepszabadsag, 20 June 2007, pp. 1, 9; ‘Francis Fukuyama a társadalmi tőke szerepét elemezte Budapesten’, Nepszabadsag, 21 June 2007, available at: http://nol.hu/archivum/archiv-451087, accessed 9 December 2013.

² Van der Merwe et al. (2009) raise awareness of the discipline's need for more impact studies. The International Journal of Transitional Justice's 2010 special issue ‘Transitional Justice on Trial—Evaluating its Impact’ also reflects the turn toward more interest in impact assessments. Olsen et al. (2010) provide one of the first cross-national time series examinations of the impact of transitional justice. However, none of these studies examines the effects of lustration.

³ See Merriam-Webster's dictionary, available at: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lustrate, accessed 26 October 2011.

⁴ See www.ddr-wissen.de/wiki/ddr.pl?Zersetzung, accessed 18 October 2011.

⁵ See also the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights' Case of Bobek v. Poland, 2007 (section 39) and Matyjek v. Poland, 2007 (section 44) (European Court of Human Rights 2007a, 2007b).

⁶ This is question A165 for most waves of the World Values Survey, but is listed as V23 in the most recent fifth wave. It measures the percentage of people who responded that most people can be trusted (World Values Survey 1981–2008).

⁷ See Stan's 2009 edited volume for a range of lustration and transitional justice programmes across the post-communist space.

⁸ Author's conversation with János Kornai at Collegium Budapest, Hungary, 14 October 2002.

⁹ For the lustration implementation variable and the lustration dummy r = 0.91. For lustration packaged with other transitional justice measures and the lustration dummy r = 0.79. For the lustration implementation variable and the multiple transitional justice measures variable r = 0.93.

¹⁰ It is represented by the formula: trust index = 100+% of most people can be trusted – (minus) % of can't be too careful.

¹¹ The possible vetting of the clergy in Poland has been the subject of controversy. It is estimated that one tenth of the clergy were secret police informers: ‘Poland and the Past: Tainted Vestments’, The Economist, 13 January 2007, p. 47. The church's collaboration with the secret police under communism is a well known secret, but what remains unclear is what widespread revelations would mean to the myth of Polish Catholicism both as an opposition force under Communism, and as a moral compass for the present (Ascherson 2007). Poland has rejected calls for the inclusion of the clergy under the lustration laws.

¹² Note: the NDB data are not available from the authors, so the data used were compiled from all the NDB surveys that are publicly available.

¹³ Because the dataset is incomplete in terms of annual coverage of the measures, the inclusion of democracy as a control drops the sample to 28 and the inclusion of corruption drops the sample to 25. Including trust in government or trust in public institutions drops the sample to 10 and 9 respectively. These sample sizes are too small to provide reliable results.

¹⁴ The results for the WVS measure and the WVS index were the same; therefore Table 3 alternates the reported results.

¹⁵ Change in GDP was dropped because it yields the same results as change in GDP per capita but reduces the overall sample size.

¹⁶ Trust in government and trust in public institutions are highly correlated (r = 0.77, N = 107), so they cannot be included in the same models due to autocorrelation problems. Albania and Russia both drop out due to lack of data.

¹⁷ One, two, and three year lagged change variables were tried with similar results. Three year lagged change measures are reported here because this resulted in the largest sample size, and provided the maximal possibility to detect an inequality effect.

¹⁸ Since the correlation between change in inequality and change in GDP is low, there is no reason to assume autocorrelation or remove either from the model (r = 0.04, N = 140).