Vigorous exchanges between those who study charged topics like transitional justice using different approaches can be very helpful in progressing our understanding of the complex issues. But those reading this exchange between James Gibson and me could be left puzzled. While my review of Gibson's work shows how our two approaches can be harmonized, Gibson's review of Skeletons may urge readers to question whether, given such seemingly irreconcilable differences, transitional justice remains one field.

In what follows, I briefly address Gibson's principal concerns. But first, I correct a key conceptual misunderstanding. Gibson objects to what he characterizes as my “overarching approach of rational choice” (p. 425). But the form of rational choice that he condemns is the kind exemplified by classical models of democratization “with or without guarantees” associated with the work of Adam Przeworski and others. This approach, which has shaped the field of Comparative Democratization over the past twenty years, rests on a cost-benefit calculus that disregards time inconsistencies as well as expectations of what other actors might do. Influenced by works such as Donald Green and Ian Shapiro's Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory, I have long been deeply dissatisfied with the simplifying assumptions of such models. After all, if the communists had been entirely focused on their “narrow and short-term political interests,” they would not have stepped down peacefully. Had they done so, they would have exposed themselves to retribution or (at least) years of subsistence in the political shadow of victorious dissidents. But instead of throwing the baby out with the bath water and rejecting rational choice per se, I set out to develop a model of information asymmetry. In my model, communists know something crucial that the dissidents do not—how infiltrated the dissidents are with secret collaborators. I agree with Gibson that conventional rational choice models based on assumptions about actors' shortsighted narrow economic interests cannot satisfactorily deal with the complexities of transitional justice, and I deliberately seek to go beyond such narrow models.

Gibson offers four substantive criticisms of my book. I address each in turn.

First, he claims that I ignore the possibility that peaceful transitions followed by delayed transitional justice could have been the results of political elites' preferences for fairness followed later by a desire to see justice done. Suppose that we could demonstrate that the communist decision-makers relinquished power “for the good of their country,” that the infiltrated dissidents were motivated by the norm of “acting honorably and keeping promises,” and that the anticommunists who came to power in the late 1990s were advocating lustration out of “a real concern for injustices of the past” (p. 426). If this were true, one would have to explain why the skewed distribution of normative preferences is perfectly collinear with these politicians' strategic incentives for maintaining office. Furthermore, one would have to account for why such normative motivations would be suspended while designing the specific lustration laws. As I show elsewhere, the lustration policies that were eventually adopted in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic were not the most desirable from a fairness point of view.Footnote ¹

Gibson's second contention is that I erroneously measure transitional justice by voting behavior. I designed my survey to explore the alternative hypothesis to Skeletons—an explanation centering on voters' demand for lustration. Simply put, I wanted to find out if voters care for lustration policies at all. My survey asked respondents both about their individual preferences regarding lustration and separately to identify the party for which they voted. I found that those who support lustration are not significantly more likely to vote for pro-lustration parties than voters who oppose lustration. From this, I inferred that lustration is not salient enough with voters to direct their voting behavior. Gibson says that “by this reasoning, one might very well conclude that voting for a Republican candidate is an indicator of strength of the demand for the repeal of abortion laws.”(p. 426). In fact, if one were to phrase my reasoning in terms of the American politics analogy, it would run as follows: “If pro-choice and pro-life attitudes do not explain voting behavior, attitudes toward abortion are not as salient as other political issues that better explain voting behavior.”

Third, Gibson maintains that the alternative I explore to Skeletons—the explanation centering on voters' demand for lustration—ignores “enduring party attachments, politicians' characteristics, and multidimensional voter characteristics.” (p. 426). In support, he cites eminent behavioralists from the American politics literature. It may well be the case that how American voters behave at the polls can be explained by party identification. But the nascent democracies of postcommunist Europe are characterized by extreme voter volatility. Indeed, parties are frequently so short-lived that it is hard to imagine that voters could quickly develop the attachments Gibson describes.

Gibson's fourth, and perhaps most powerful, criticism targets the scope conditions of my model. He says that lustration has not been widely practiced outside of East and Central Europe. This is factually incorrect. As I have shown in my contribution to M. Cherif Bassiouni's volumes, The Pursuit of International Criminal Justice: A World Survey on Conflicts, Victimization, and Post-Conflict Justice, lustration procedures were considered and adopted in 41 countries since the end of World War II. And less than a quarter of these are in East Central Europe. As the world waits for the Syrian dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad to crumble, media reports have described the Soviet-style intelligence agency directed by his father, Hafez al-Assad. The network of clandestine agents perfected over the last 40 years is helping al-Assad survive while one dictatorship after another in the region is falling. How will Syria deal with its secret files? It is hard to imagine that lustration policies will be of marginal importance when dealing with the vestiges of Assad's repressive regime. But before the regime is even toppled, the Skeletons model might help us appreciate the role of secret police files in such a transition. I thus remain convinced that the model developed in Skeletons applies beyond postcommunist Europe. Indeed, as I explain in the last chapter, its implications reach even beyond contexts of transitional justice. By considering a mechanism for solving credible commitment problems, it helps us think about when peace treaties are enforceable, when demobilizations are likely to succeed, and when promises of amnesty can be kept.

By proposing a dynamic analysis of purposive behavior, Skeletons offers a way in which both the fields of transitions and transitional justice can advance beyond the twenty year-old paradigm according to which autocrats step down from power when they are promised amnesty. Neither this paradigm nor emerging paradigms of historic justice, reconciliation, and socio-tropic fairness could adequately explain—in one cogent theory—what actually occurred in postcommunist Europe. Peaceful transitions were followed by delayed transitional justice (predominantly limited to lustration), and in some instances, lustration was implemented even by the communists themselves. My strategic model, however, accounts for these phenomena as part of the same mechanism: politicians purposefully using lustration laws to win and stay in office. While “rational choice” surely cannot explain everything, in drawing upon this approach, I have been inspired by its contributions to theoretical progress in other fields, especially American politics. There, for example, in the 1970s, scholars of new institutionalism stopped using the apparatus of socialization and political drives to explain legislative phenomena. Instead, they interpreted the conduct of Congressmen as purposive behavior oriented towards seeking reelection. This helped open new avenues of research in American politics.

Finally, Skeletons expressly focuses on offering a positive argument. It is not about deriving normative implications for the reconciliation of post-authoritarian societies. Nor is it about offering policy makers clear-cut solutions to their transitional justice dilemmas. In light of how little we know about the nature of political violence in the context of regime transitions, offering such policy recommendations would be ill-considered and a bit presumptuous. But I doubt that we can even begin recommending that post-conflict societies embrace this or any other transitional justice mechanism if we do not fully appreciate how they can be misused strategically as a tool of eliminating political competition.