Transitional Justice and Trust in Institutions

Transitional-justice institutions are usually evaluated against a narrow set of outcomes — convictions secured, victims acknowledged, political elites removed. Transitional Justice and Trust in Institutions asks instead whether the long-run effect of transitional justice runs through institutional trust: trust in courts, in bureaucratic agencies, in the state’s monopoly on adjudication. The project uses cross-national survey data on institutional trust matched to comparative measures of transitional-justice scope, with an eye toward how the trust mechanism mediates compliance with state authority more broadly.