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Any country in the aftermath of transition to democracy confronts the challenge of transitional justice, that is, the task of designing a system of procedures for holding perpetrators and collaborators of the ancien regime responsible for their past activity. Two important normative goals that transitional justice shares with any system of justice are avoiding false convictions (punishing the innocent) on the one hand, and false acquittals (letting the guilty go) on the other. Different systems of transitional justice will vary in the extent to which they fulfill these normative goals. In this article I offer an approach to the study of systems of transitional justice that distinguishes between confession-based and accusation-based truth-revelation procedures (CTRs and ATRs). Game-theoretic models of plea bargaining from the law and economics literature are adapted to compare CTRs to ATRs. I evaluate their performance with respect to avoiding false conviction and false acquittal. I establish plausible conditions under which CTRs perform better than ATRs and formulate propositions. The empirical implications are illustrated with three cases from East Central Europe.

Any country in the aftermath of transition to democracy confronts the challenge of transitional justice, that is, the task of designing a system of procedures for holding perpetrators and collaborators of the ancien regime responsible for their past activity. Two important normative goals that transitional justice shares with any system of justice are avoiding false convictions (punishing the innocent) on the one hand, and false acquittals (letting the guilty go) on the other. Different systems of transitional justice will vary in the extent to which they fulfill these normative goals. In this article I offer an approach to the study of systems of transitional justice that distinguishes between confession-based and accusation-based truth-revelation procedures (CTRs and ATRs). Game-theoretic models of plea bargaining from the law and economics literature are adapted to compare CTRs to ATRs. I evaluate their performance with respect to avoiding false conviction and false acquittal. I establish plausible conditions under which CTRs perform better than ATRs and formulate propositions. The empirical implications are illustrated with three cases from East Central Europe. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright 2008.]

Conventional wisdom suggests that parties in candidate-centered electoral systems should be associated with less cohesive policy preferences among legislators. We model the incentives of party leaders to achieve voting unity accounting for the costs of discipline, showing that candidate-centered systems have the counterintuitive effect of promoting party agreement on policies and preference cohesion. These implications for cohesion derive from the degree of control over list rank held by leaders under open lists (open-list proportional representation, OLPR) and closed lists (closed-list proportional representation, CLPR). Because discipline is costlier in OLPR, owing to leaders' lack of control over list rank, leaders seeking voting unity propose policies that promote agreement between members and leadership. Under CLPR, however, leaders can more easily achieve voting unity by relying on discipline and therefore lack incentives to promote internal agreement. We then extend the model to allow the party leader to replace members, showing that preference cohesion itself is greater under OLPR. Further, our baseline results hold when allowing legislative behavior to affect vote share and when accounting for candidates' valence qualities. We interpret our results to suggest that candidate-centered systems result in stronger incentives for developing programmatic parties, compared with party-centered systems.