Varieties of Authoritarian Legacies

New democracies have followed different trajectories of democratic consolidation and retained varied vestiges of the former dictatorship. This paper is an effort to find an explanation for such variation in authoritarian legacies across post-authoritarian democracies. To do so, I first discuss two key components of authoritarian legacies: authoritarian inheritance and authoritarian reference. I describe the variations in institutional inheritance and strategies for referring the past in the post-transition political context. Second, I introduce an index of authoritarian legacies by combining and developing different instruments measuring authoritarian inheritance and reference across post-authoritarian countries. After discussing the key characteristics of the authoritarian legacies index (ALI), I examine key predictors of authoritarian legacies, with variables capturing pre- and post-transition features.