Justice in Action: Assessing the Institutional Design and Implementation of Transitional Justice
type: CreativeWork
description: There is a growing literature in political science that focuses on the impact that policies, or mechanisms, of transitional justice (e.g. tribunals, truth commissions, and amnesty laws) have on future human rights abuses and democratization processes. However, this literature fails to differentiate between having a policy on the books and having a policy which is actually implemented. My project attempts for the first time to measure and assess how well two distinct types of transitional justice policies, truth commissions and ad-hoc tribunals, are designed and how well they are implemented. Variation in terms of policy structure (or institutional design) and implementation are currently unknown; knowing what the level of this variation is will enable us to understand the impact these transitional justice policies have on state-level human rights behavior. To conduct this analysis, I first offer a derivation of principal-agent theory and then assemble a new dataset of measures culled from primary and secondary data sources on over 40 different courts and truth commissions. For the data on the institutional design of these transitional justice policies, I collected and translated the legal mandates which create courts or commissions. I then coded the power, authority, and resource allocations which are designated in these mandates. For the data on implementation, I collected primary commission and court reports as well as secondary analyses and tracked the various activities and forms of engagement which were utilized in the process of carrying out each policy. These data were then compiled with a full set of economic, political, and social context measures and analyzed to determine whether policies with (1) more allocated authority/power or resources or (2) better implementation produced greater improvements in respect for human rights or reduced the likelihood of having additional instances of rights violations. Overall, I find that design and implementation measur…
abstract: There is a growing literature in political science that focuses on the impact that policies, or mechanisms, of transitional justice (e.g. tribunals, truth commissions, and amnesty laws) have on future human rights abuses and democratization processes. However, this literature fails to differentiate between having a policy on the books and having a policy which is actually implemented. My project attempts for the first time to measure and assess how well two distinct types of transitional justice policies, truth commissions and ad-hoc tribunals, are designed and how well they are implemented. Variation in terms of policy structure (or institutional design) and implementation are currently unknown; knowing what the level of this variation is will enable us to understand the impact these transitional justice policies have on state-level human rights behavior. To conduct this analysis, I first offer a derivation of principal-agent theory and then assemble a new dataset of measures culled from primary and secondary data sources on over 40 different courts and truth commissions. For the data on the institutional design of these transitional justice policies, I collected and translated the legal mandates which create courts or commissions. I then coded the power, authority, and resource allocations which are designated in these mandates. For the data on implementation, I collected primary commission and court reports as well as secondary analyses and tracked the various activities and forms of engagement which were utilized in the process of carrying out each policy. These data were then compiled with a full set of economic, political, and social context measures and analyzed to determine whether policies with (1) more allocated authority/power or resources or (2) better implementation produced greater improvements in respect for human rights or reduced the likelihood of having additional instances of rights violations. Overall, I find that design and implementation measur…
author: Miller, Jennifer Lee
language: en_US
keywords: Human Rights, Policy Assessment, Transitional Justice, Truth Commissions, Political Science, Courts/Tribunals
date published: 2014
date modified: 2026-07-24T00:56:34Z
provider: University of Arizona
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: The University of Arizona.

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/10150/322967