Shaping democracy: The politics of transitional justice in Italy and Portugal

The dissertation proposes a theoretical framework to explain why and how transitional justice helps shape post-authoritarian democracies' long-term political development. The framework centers on a distinctive set of recurring mechanisms -- i.e. selection, resocialization and redescription -- that determine how societies conserve, dismantle or replace key political actors, institutions, networks, norms and narratives inherited from the dictatorship. The study applies the proposed framework to provide an analytical comparison of Italy's and Portugal's long term democratic development. In so doing, it claims that post-authoritarian Italy and Portugal set up divergent transitional justice regimes, and that these differences helped shape ideological polarization, social capital and democratic legitimacy in ways that affected the quality of these countries' democracy over time.