PE/PI Seminar: Georg Vanberg (Duke)

Georg Vanberg (Duke) will present his talk, "Transitional Justice and Bureaucratic Oversight: Tainted Prosecutors and Accountability for Nazi Crimes." The abstract is below.

Abstract:
Democratic transitions typically present a "retention dilemma" -- to what extent can new democracies rely on civil servants and bureaucrats who served the authoritarian regime? Principal-agent theory suggests that a key factor in this context is appropriate institutional design: Tainted officials are likely to pose a threat to democratic transitions when they are not subject to effective monitoring and oversight. We analyze a unique dataset of prosecutorial decisions regarding close to 15,000 allegations of Nazi crimes in post-war West Germany. The results strongly suggest that institutional context matters: Nazi affiliations by local prosecutors (subject to extensive oversight) had no effect on prosecutorial decisions. But prosecutors-general (largely independent of oversight) with ties to the Nazi regime were far less likely to initiate prosecutions than their untainted counterparts.