Marek M. Kaminski

Normative and Strategic Aspects of Transitional Justice

/Vfter atrocities, disappearances, and other human rights violations, the dictatorship in Authoritania falls, and a new democratic regime takes power, changing the coun trys name to Freedonia. How should Freedonia deal with Authoritanias rulers and their agents? Do they have options between forgiveness and full-scale retribution? Should agents of the past regime be allowed political rights? Should victims be com pensated, and should confiscated property be restored? What role does the interna tional community have? These kinds of dilemmas constitute the field of transitional justice. Transitional jus tice refers to formal and informal procedures implemented by a group or institution of accepted legitimacy around the time of a transition out of an oppressive or violent social order, for rendering justice to perpetrators and their collaborators, as well as to their victims. Following Elster (2004), we divide transitional justice into endogenous and exogenous. In the endogenous case, the procedures are administered by the society itself, without external intervention. Exogenous transitional justice is administered from the outside, typically by agents who were not engaged in the conflict, and often

Judging Transitional Justice A New Criterion For Evaluating Truth Revelation Procedures

Truth revelation procedures are evaluated according to various normative criteria. The authors find the concepts of false conviction and false acquittal more adequate for such evaluation than the conformity with the rule of law and apply a useful classification of truth revelation procedures into incentive-based (ITRs) and evidence-based ones (ETRs). ITRs induce perpetrators and secret agents of the authoritarian regime to reveal the truth about their past, while ETRs rely exclusively on preserved evidence and victims’ testimonies. Using a simple decision-making model, the authors show that while both procedures are sensitive to the problem of falsified evidence, ITRs perform better with respect to revealing the identity of collaborators whose files were destroyed. Finally, they discuss the connection between ITRs and two modes of coming to terms with the past, endogenous and exogenous.

A General Equilibrium Model of Multi-Party Competition

The paper introduces a generalized spatial model that is motivated by the frequent changes in party identity and electoral laws that characterize transitional party systems. In this model, parties may (1) change their platforms, (2) their identities through coalitions and splits and (3) if they form a winning coalition, the electoral law. The equilibrium is defined as a state such that no party or coalition can strictly benefit from changing the electoral law, its platform, or from splitting or coalescing. The results show that while there are games with no institutional or coalitional-split equilibria, such equilibria do exist under relatively undemanding conditions. The main finding is that once an institutional and identity equilibrium is achieved, it is generically robust against small trembles in party platforms or voter preferences. This robustness facilitates greater stability in terms of institutions and party identities in mature party systems where such trembles are smaller than in transitional systems.

Poland: Learning to Manipulate Electoral Rules

When given the opportunity, politicians try to manipulate democratic institutions to their own advantage (Riker, 1986). In mature democracies, institutional constraints that prevent manipulation have evolved over time. In contrast, the political systems of young democracies are less restricted in this area and encourage electoral heresthetics. The most vulnerable parameters of parliamentary elections are district magnitudes and boundaries, the formulas for seat allocation, the ballot structure, the thresholds of exclusion and the timing of elections.

Metody głosowania w okręgach jednomandatowych i ich własności

The paper starts with the definitions of five major voting methods that can be applied in single-member districts. Then the political consequences of single-member districts are discussed. The special attention is paid to those consequences that are considered negative and to potential ways of neutralizing them. The next section compares selected subtle effects of using simple majority rule versus alternative vote. The final section reviews methods that mix proportional representation and majoritarian components.

Schelling Games, Kuran Dominos and Electoral Coalitions : Non-standard Game-theoretic Models of Collective Action

Non-cooperative games such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma, Stag Hunt, Asymmetric Coordination and others are primary tools used for modeling collective action. I consider formal models that are close cousins of such standard games: Schelling’s games, Kuran’s dominos and partition function form games. For certain empirical problems, each of these formalisms may have advantages over standard games. Among the benefi ts there are mathematical simplicity, more intuitive depiction of represented phenomena, and better operationalizability. I formalize all three models and prove simple existence theorems for two of them. The detailed examples of applications include vaccination, unpredictability of revolutions, and electoral coalitions.

Social choice and information: the informational structure of uniqueness theorems in axiomatic social theories

Abstract The paper introduces the category of algebraic axioms and investigates when a social rule of decision-making can be uniquely characterized with such axioms. The first result shows that every set of axioms that characterize a given rule is equivalent to a set of three algebraic axioms. The second result suggests a method for constructing an algebraic proof of uniqueness via finding an appropriate path of maps. It says that we can characterize a rule if and only if we can find a path. Both theorems are then used to prove and analyze various characterization results in Mays binary social choice, Nash bargaining theory, and Sens social choice theory.