Etapa inicial: la «Edad Dorada» del Arcade.

Given the democratization and transitional justice literature’s emphasis on civil society, I expect social forces to have a large influence on reparations efforts. The social movement literature and transitional justice literature prompt me to narrow this focus even further, because civil society is made up of diverse forces that sometimes work at cross-purposes. Civil society is hardly a uniformly pro-justice coalition, however, and it is important not to view it as such (Berman 1997). Indeed, this is one of the emerging themes in transitional justice literature, as

recent works consistently emphasize that the desires and demands of a specific sector of civil

society, namely victims’ organizations, carry special weight in the development and

implementation of transitional justice mechanisms. As the discipline continues to move toward emphasizing victim-centered responses to human rights abuses, the centerpiece of which requires recognizing that victims are not passive observers but rather active participants in their own lives, it has also devoted more attention to examining the influence that victims’ organizations can have on transitional justice decisions. (Méndez 2016; Fletcher and Weinstein 2017)

From a theoretical standpoint, there is strong reason to believe that victims’ organizations hold the key to governments’ reparations decisions. While other civil society sectors play a role

in steering the course of transitional justice, I expect victims’ organizations to be the driving force behind both reparations promises and payments. Reparations are the only victim-centered transitional justice mechanism, victims stand to gain or lose the most from a government’s reparations policy, and the literature shows that victims can play an influential role in shaping transitional justice and reparations endeavors when they get involved (Goschler 1992, 2005; Lillteicher 2007a; Méndez 2016; Fletcher and Weinstein 2017).

Reparations tend to be elite affairs rather than an issue that draws voters to the polls, but victims can turn their reparations demands into a feature of an electoral contest by rallying supporters and influencers to their cause. Society cannot be sympathetic to victims or reward politicians for caring about victims when people are unaware of or unfavorably disposed towards victims and their needs, however, and so victims must be visible advocates for their position in order to attract the domestic sympathy necessary for political influence. It is particularly

important for the victims in my universe of cases to attempt to attract societal sympathy or to at least avoid attracting negative attention from the broader population, because these individuals

are victims of government-sponsored abuses. This means that, for whatever reason, a majority of

the country’s citizens either tacitly permitted or actively supported the commission of these crimes. Consequently, it is unlikely that the general population thinks kindly enough of these individuals to do an immediate about-face and support a massive expenditure of government funds on their behalf. As a result, victims need to either work actively to change societal perceptions of them or remain inoffensive enough to be able to convince politicians of the political benefits (electoral and/or reputational) of promising and paying reparations.

Although victim group strength and societal sympathy are clearly closely linked, ideally I would include both of these variables in my analysis. However, there are no data on the level of

societal sympathy for victims in a given context, nor is there a metric for assessing, much less quantifying, societal sympathy. Furthermore, given the lack of detailed documentation on these cases, at this point in time it is simply impossible to collect valid cross-temporal, cross-regional data on societal sympathy. With appropriate country-level expertise, it may be possible to qualitatively evaluate the varying levels of societal sympathy present in a single case and then assess how that connects to governments’ reparations decisions, but conducting such an analysis in a quantitative fashion, let alone across multiple cases, is not feasible with a dataset that includes largely historical cases. However, because societal sympathy for victims of

government-sponsored abuses will not develop unless victims and their allies make concerted efforts to reeducate and persuade the general population, and because it requires organization on the part of victims and their allies in order to mount such efforts in the first place, a measure of victim group strength will likely capture some of the effects of societal sympathy, as well. Future research into the how societal sympathy relates to reparations would be welcome, but it is

beyond the scope of this project.

In cases where there are reputational (and potentially concomitant economic) costs for denying reparations to victims of human rights abuses, politicians have an incentive to commit to these promises and payments, regardless of the electoral power of the victims. However, such reputational benefits are unlikely to exist when victims are not visible enough to attract either the domestic societal sympathy or the international support that expose politicians to reputational costs in the first place. Only when victims’ organizations mobilize to demand reparations are they able to place pressure on the government, increase the domestic and international visibility of the need for reparations, attract allies who do have the political clout necessary to extract concessions from politicians, and ensure that reparations promises are translated into genuine

reparations payments. Consequently, I expect that, in the absence of strong, pro-reparations victims’ organizations, governments are unlikely to either make or fulfill a commitment as costly as reparations. To clarify, this theory is probabilistic rather than deterministic, arguing that strong victims’ organizations make reparations promises and payments more likely, not that they are, on

their own, a sufficient cause of reparations promises and/or payments.

H1: Governments will be more likely to promise and pay reparations in cases where strong victims’ organizations demand reparations.

My second hypothesis deals with regime type. In line with both Powers and Proctor (2015) and the general truism about democratic governments being more responsive to citizens’ demands than autocratic ones, I expect democracy to have a positive effect on the incidence of both reparations promises and payments. There are, of course, many different ways to define democracy, but my argument is not tied to a specific definition. Instead, I expect that regime type matters because it influences governments’ responsiveness to citizens and citizens’ willingness and ability to seek political change through social mobilization. Consequently, it does not matter whether the state in question qualifies as, say, a polyarchy, a consolidated democracy, or a representative democracy; what matters is that the state has the political feedback mechanisms, respect for democratic norms, and citizen protections that are present in democracies—

particularly free and fair elections, respect for the rule of law, and the right to free speech, all of which are included in basic operationalizations of democratic quality. In order to ensure that my results are robust to the plethora of definitions of democracy, I utilize multiple different

operationalizations of democracy when I run the quantitative tests of my hypotheses.

As a rule of thumb, office-seeking politicians in democracies need to appeal to voters in order to win elections and gain power, whereas the rulers of autocratic regimes do not face that same imperative. This is not to say that autocratic regimes are immune to citizens’ desires; they

are sensitive to public opinion, and they are highly unlikely to simply ignore mobilized civilian groups (Geddes and Zaller 1989; Robertson 2010). However, the opportunities to form, foster, and consolidate civil society groups are much more limited in an autocratic regime than a democratic regime, and they are more likely to be met with repression, as well (Diamond 2002; Howard 2002). As a result, citizens are more likely to be able to vocally demand that their government promise and pay reparations in a democracy than an autocracy.

This does raise the potential of a chicken-and-egg question; what if victim organizations form only in countries where they expect to succeed in making their reparations claims? The simple answer to this is that the facts on the ground do not support this. Victims’ organizations generally form primarily to offer solidarity and meet fellow survivors’ immediate needs, and they usually do not consider the possibility of agitating for reparations for years, if they ever do at all. Because the original purpose of most victims’ organizations is to provide support and solidarity, not to pursue reparations claims, these organizations are created in all sorts of contexts and under all sorts of regime types. Indeed, most, if not all, victims’ organizations exist for years—often in highly informal configurations—before they even begin considering reparations, let alone actively requesting reparations. Many victims’ organizations never articulate

reparations demands at all. Thus, there is no compelling reason to believe that victims’ organizations exist only in places where victims expect their reparations claims to succeed.

Furthermore, the information I gathered during my fieldwork showed that survivors generally band together while abusive periods are ongoing, e.g. in nondemocratic contexts. They usually do not demand reparations until the abuses have ended and the country has begun to democratize, but, even then, the timing of groups’ initial reparations demands tends not to coincide with the installation of a particularly friendly government. This indicates that survivors

are not mobilizing and formulating demands in response to what they believe the government is willing to give; they are mobilizing and formulating demands at their own pace, in response to their own needs.

Similarly, victim groups can be extremely strong even in adverse contexts where they have no realistic expectation of encountering a receptive government. For example, the Mothers

of the Plaza de Mayo (Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo), which spearheaded the victims’

rights movement in Argentina, was visible, vocal, and influential even during the repressive climate of the military dictatorship (1976-1983), over a decade before the government even

began considering, much less promising, reparations.15 _{The low correlation coefficients between}

victim strength and various measures of regime type also provide a quantitative rebuttal the idea that victim group strength is an artifact of regime type or a proxy for regime type (See Appendix Table 7). However, because democracy and reparations results could still be having an

interactive effect on each other, I include an interaction term of democracy and victim group strength in my models.

H2: Reparations promises and reparations payments will be more likely to occur in democratic rather than undemocratic contexts.