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"This book tackles three puzzles of pacted transitions to democracy. First, why do autocrats ever step down from power peacefully if they know that they may be held accountable for their involvement in the ancien regime? Second, when does the opposition indeed refrain from meting out punishment to the former autocrats once the transition is complete? Third, why, in some countries, does transitional justice get adopted when successors of former communists hold parliamentary majorities?" "Monika Nalepa argues that infiltration of the opposition with collaborators of the authoritarian regime can serve as insurance against transitional justice, making their commitments to amnesty credible. This explanation also accounts for the timing of transitional justice across East Central Europe. Nalepa supports her theory using a combination of elite interviews, archival evidence, and statistical analysis of survey experiments in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic."--Jacket

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.

Overcoming Historical Injustices: Land Reconciliation in South Africa. By James L. Gibson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 328p. $92.00.All three of James Gibson's books on transitional justice in South Africa focus on showing that the politics of reconciliation with the Apartheid regime are less related to economic "self-interest" than to "sociotropic fairness." On close examination, Gibson concludes that an individual's preferences about land reconciliation are not a direct function of egocentric instrumentalism. Rather, in his view, they are shaped by conceptions of whether one's group has been fairly treated.

How do perceptions of procedural fairness shape the preferences that citizens have for transitional justice (TJ) in postauthoritarian countries? This article uses original opinion poll data collected in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to investigate this question. It shows that differences in the demand for TJ are explained by how citizens perceive whether the TJ process commits errors—that is, whether the innocent are condemned (falsely convicted) or the guilty are exonerated (falsely acquitted). This is so even after accounting for threat perceptions of former autocrats and voting behavior. After comparing the ways in which citizens' perceptions of errors in the TJ process shape their demand for lustration in the three postcommunist countries, the author discusses the implications of these findings for scholars of democratic consolidation, social psychologists, and policy makers designing TJ systems.

How can outgoing autocrats enforce promises of amnesty once they have left power? Why would incoming opposition parties honor their prior promises of amnesty once they have assumed power and face no independent mechanisms of enforcement? In 1989 autocrats in a number of communist countries offered their respective oppositions free elections in exchange for promises of amnesty. The communists' decision appears irrational given the lack of institutions to enforce these promises of amnesty. What is further puzzling is that the former opposition parties that won elections in many countries actually refrained from implementing transitional justice measures. Their decision to honor their prior agreements to grant amnesty seems as irrational as the autocrats' decisions to place themselves at the mercy of their opponents. Using an analytic narrative approach, the author explains this paradox by modeling pacted transitions not as simple commitment problems but as games of incomplete information where the uninformed party has "skeletons in its closet"—that is, embarrassing information that provides insurance against the commitments being broken. The author identifies the conditions under which autocrats step down even though they can be punished with transitional justice and illustrates the results with case studies from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary.