How Does Kompromat Affect Politics? A Model of Transparency Regimes

Abstract

Why are transparency regimes so rare? When some politicians have something to conceal, why would their opponents not press for transparency? To analyze transitional justice, we build a model that explains why uncompromised politicians might avoid a transparency regime, which could signal to the voters that they are clean. We model the interaction between an incumbent, an opposition leader, a strategic blackmailer, and voters who know that the opposition politician may be compromised. The incumbent can implement a transparency regime, which would force out a compromised opponent and thus make blackmail impossible. We show that, instead, she might strategically opt for no transparency that keeps all skeletons of the ancien régime in the closet, as it is easier to defeat a potentially compromised opponent. We corroborate our results using original data from the Global Transitional Justice Dataset combined with data on elections, incumbency, and successor autocrat status in post-communist Europe.

Kompromat Can Align Incentives but Ruin Reputations

“…Some formerly authoritarian countries have engaged in “lustration,” the practice of revealing political leaders' past collaboration with the previous regime in order to remove the possibility of using this as kompromat. Although lustration removes the possibility of blackmail and makes voters better off (Ang and Nalepa 2019), uncompromised politicians may not enact lustration if the taint of collaboration with the previous regime harms their opponents' electoral prospects (Nalepa and Sonin 2019). Even though lustration may improve the welfare of voters in a newly democratic context, our theory suggests it also comes at a cost if removing the possibility of kompromat worsens agency problems between a policymaker and her subordinate.…”