Truth Commissions after Economic Crises: Political Learning or Blame Game?
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321717706902 |
| Date | 01 February 2018 |
| Published date | 01 February 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321717706902
Political Studies
2018, Vol. 66(1) 173 –191
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321717706902
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Truth Commissions after
Economic Crises: Political
Learning or Blame Game?
Iosif Kovras1, Shaun McDaid2
and Ragnar Hjalmarsson3
Abstract
This article addresses an important but understudied aspect of the recent Great Recession in
Europe: the institutional strategies political elites deployed to learn from past policy failures and
address accountability, more specifically, truth commissions. We raise two overlapping puzzles.
The first concerns the timing of the decision to adopt an economic truth commission: while
Iceland established a truth commission at an early stage of the crisis, Greece and Ireland did
so much later. What accounts for ‘early’ versus ‘delayed’ truth seekers? The second concerns
variations in learning outcomes. Iceland’s commission paved the way for learning institutional
lessons, but truth commissions in Greece and Ireland became overtly politicised. What accounts
for these divergences? This article compares truth commissions in Iceland, Greece and Ireland
and identifies two types of political learning – institutional and instrumental – related to the
establishment of a truth commission. It argues that political elites in countries with higher pre-
crisis levels of trust in institutions and public transparency are more likely to establish economic
truth commissions quickly; this is the ‘institutional logic’ of learning. The ‘instrumental logic’ of
learning, in contrast, leads governments interested in apportioning blame to their predecessors to
establish commissions at a later date, usually proximal to critical elections.
Keywords
economic crisis, accountability, political learning, commissions of inquiry, truth commissions
Accepted: 27 January 2017
The recent Great Recession in Europe provides an excellent avenue to explore how political
elites use institutions to learn from policy failures. Of special relevance in this case are the
truth commissions (TCs) established by several countries to identify the causes of their
1Department of International Politics, City University of London, London, UK
2Division of Criminology, Politics and Sociology, University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, UK
3Hertie School of Governance, Berlin, Germany
Corresponding author:
Iosif Kovras, Department of International Politics, City University of London, Rhind Building, Northampton
Square, London EC1V 0HB, UK.
Email: Iosif.Kovras@city.ac.uk; kovras@gmail.com
706902PSX0010.1177/0032321717706902Political StudiesKovras et al.
research-article2017
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174 Political Studies 66(1)
economic meltdowns. Their goal was to document institutional, political and/or individual
failures and publish reports offering guidelines for institutional, policy and regulatory
reforms. These particular TCs constitute an institutional innovation. Their sudden appear-
ance, coupled with differences across countries, prompts numerous questions, two of which
we seek to answer here. First, what explains the decision to set up a TC after an economic
crisis? Is there a uniform explanation for their establishment or does this vary? Second, why
in certain countries did political elites attempt to use TCs for political gain, while in others,
they favoured restoring trust to state institutions over partisan considerations?
This article addresses these questions by looking at three economic TCs: the
Icelandic Special Investigation Committee (SIC), established in 2008; the Greek
Committee on Public Debt, established in 2015; and Ireland’s Parliamentary Banking
Inquiry (BI), established in 2014. From the comparison, we identify two types of politi-
cal learning displayed by political elites related to the establishment of a TC. The first,
institutional learning, applies to countries where rebuilding trust after a major eco-
nomic crisis is important for political elites: here, levels of public transparency and
trust in institutions were already high in pre-crisis periods, and a TC appeared in the
early stages of the crisis. The second, instrumental learning, applies to countries where
newly elected governments had no direct involvement with the arrival or immediate
(mis)management of the crisis. Here, TCs were only established when seen as expedi-
ent, usually before or after critical political events such as elections or International
Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout negotiations. In effect, they were useful devices to blame
predecessors and gain electoral spoils.
This article is divided into seven sections. The section ‘TCs, Transitional Justice and
Economic Crises’ defines TCs and explains why the term can be used to describe the
institutions under study. The section ‘The “Blind Spot” of Political Learning’ shows how
the concept of political learning can help us understand the decision to adopt TCs. The
section ‘Puzzles and Research Design’, discusses the research methodology and design,
while the following section, ‘Alternative Explanations’ considers several alternative,
albeit unsatisfactory, hypotheses as to why governments adopt economic TCs. The sec-
tion ‘Institutional versus Instrumental Learning’ develops a new theoretical framework to
explain the adoption of TCs by governments at either early or late stages: institutional
learning for early adopters and instrumental learning for late adopters. The final two sec-
tions explore each type of learning in turn, with case studies of institutional learning
(Iceland) and instrumental learning (Ireland and Greece). The article concludes by evalu-
ating the success of these mechanisms and identifying their flaws. As will be shown, the
instrumental approach to learning can backfire on governments, downplaying instead of
highlighting the role their predecessors played in the crisis.
TCs, Transitional Justice and Economic Crises
Transitional justice is a framework usually associated with dealing with the past in
post-conflict societies (Kritz, 1995). It points to the importance of learning from the
past and explores the impact of different policies of formal acknowledgement of wrong-
doing, including prosecutions (Sikkink, 2011), TCs (Wiebelhaus-Brahm, 2010) and
amnesties or partial impunity (McEvoy and Mallinder, 2012) on the quality of the
emerging political institutions.
TCs are independent, officially sanctioned, fact-finding mechanisms tasked to investi-
gate and document patterns of past human rights violations, often following a political
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