Professor Giovanni Capoccia awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship

Congratulations to Giovanni Capoccia, who has been awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for a project entitled Reshaping Democracy after Authoritarianism: Explaining Responses to Neo-Fascism in Western Europe.

All democracies that emerge after the rapid demise of an authoritarian regime face the problem of how to deal with individuals, organizations and parties tied to the old regime. Although the 'backward-looking' facet of this problem—whether to amnesty or punish individuals connected with the old regime—is tackled in the well-established field of transitional justice, the 'forward-looking' dimension of whether to give political rights to individual or organizational 'successors' of the old regime has received little attention from empirical social scientists. This project addresses this gap in the literature by asking why some post-authoritarian democracies allow for extensive successor political participation while others adopt highly restrictive policies towards successor dissent.

Combining advances in institutional theory and in the study of democratization, the project focuses on Western Europe between 1945 and today. The institutional innovations in democratic rule of the post-war period included a variety of legal and policy arrangements that limited the participation rights of individuals and organizations tied to fascism. The study of West European countries, which followed a number of different policy trajectories, should also generate important insights for the analysis of how more recently democratized states deal with 'successor' dissent linked to the prior authoritarian regime, thus guiding research on this hitherto neglected facet of democratization.

The project will run from September 2014 to September 2017.