Please note that this week's PAIS seminar is being held on Thursday.

The paper analyzes the impact of the implementation of transitional justice (TJ) policies on individual democratic attitudes in West Germany after 1945. Building on the social psychology literature on punishment in criminal justice, the paper argues that attitudes toward democracy are primarily driven by the outcomes rather than by the formal characteristics of TJ policies, and particularly by the perceived proportionality of punishment. In the German case, widespread uncertainty about the guilt of defendants in TJ trials led the general public to consider lenient punishment more legitimate, whereas more widespread harsh punishment undermined democratic support. Compared to the general public, democratic attitudes of TJ targets were instead promoted by both more widespread lenient and harsh punishments. The analysis of three national surveys conducted during the 1950s shows that these effects persist in the medium term. These findings point to the importance of a more systematic analysis of TJ outcomes in comparative research on the consequences of TJ policies.

Giovanni Capoccia is Professor of Comparative Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford, where he is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College.

His research and teaching interests focus on democratization, political extremism, theories of institutional development, and European politics. He is the author of two monographs, including Defending Democracy: Responses to Extremism in Interwar Europe (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), which was awarded the APSA Prize for the Best Book in European Politics. He is also the co-editor of a special double issue of Comparative Political Studies entitled The Historical Turn in Democratization Studies, which develops a new framework for the study of democratization in Europe and beyond. His work has appeared in Comparative Political Studies, the European Journal of Political Research, the Journal of Politics, the Journal of Theoretical Politics, and World Politics, among other outlets. He has been the recipient of APSA's Sage Award for the Best Paper in Comparative Politics (2011), the Mary Parker Follett Award in Politics and History (2011), the Award for the Best Paper in Comparative Democratization (2010), the Alexander George Award for the Best Article in Qualitative and Multi-Method Research (2008), and the Sage Award for the Best Paper in Qualitative and Multi-Method Research (2006). He has been the Rita E. Hauser Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, a Visiting Fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for Comparative Law in Heidelberg, and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for European Studies at Harvard and at the Institute for Political Science at the University of Heidelberg. His research has also been supported by the Nuffield Foundation, the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD), the Italian Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR) and various other national and international funding agencies. He is currently working on a monograph provisionally entitled Setting the Boundaries of Democracy. Policy Responses to the Extreme Right in Postwar Western Europe, where he analyzes why Western European democracies after 1945 have adopted different policy responses to the extreme right.