Political Science Speaker Series: Jennifer Gandhi

Do post-dictatorship trials of repressive agents promote public support for human rights and the courts? We argue that convictions repudiate agents’ human rights violations and the associated dictatorship, reducing public acceptance of these violations. However, courts in transitional settings are flawed messengers: trials call attention to judicial weakness and unorthodox legal strategies, decreasing belief in judicial fairness. The effects of human rights trials are estimated in Argentina, a country ruled by military dictatorship from 1976-1983 that, twenty-five years later, initiated sweeping human rights trials for past repression. Using observational day-level opinion data from a survey fielded around the guilty verdict for one of the dictatorship’s top-ranking generals, we find the trial verdict increased public rejection of torture and political killings. Yet belief in judicial fairness declined. These results suggest that trials solidify public commitments to human rights, but confidence in the judiciary is not a necessary condition for this effect.