Comparing Transitional Justice Processes in the Southern European Democratizations of the Third Wave

The literature has shown that collective memories of authoritarian periods can shape contemporary political attitudes and behaviors, particularly by creating specific biases and stigmas associated with the ideology of the previous dictatorship. But other line of research has also confirmed the progressive fading away of those legacies, as the recent electoral success of populist and radical parties has shown. In this paper we ask whether this hypothetical fading away of those biases and stigmas has taken place and, in that case, whether this can in turn lead to changes in how political parties deal with their past. We do that by looking into the three Southern European countries that made their transition to democracy roughly 50 years ago, in the beginning of the third wave of democratization. Empirically, we use party manifestos, legislative activity records, and public discourses to examine whether the emergence of new political forces following the Great Recession impacted transitional justice discourses and practices in Portugal, Spain, and Greece.