Regime Type and National Remembrance.

Analysts have speculated that regime type has a powerful influence on how countries remember, and thus on the potential for international reconciliation. A well-established school of political science theory argues that authoritarian regimes, challenged for legitimacy and lacking a free marketplace of ideas to combat bad information, often purvey chauvinist myths about their past behavior. In democracies, on the other hand, leaders have electoral legitimacy, and a free marketplace of ideas can contest the spread of false information. In this paper, I deduce the "Scapegoating Authoritarians" hypothesis from this conventional wisdom. I support this view with evidence that only democracies have been willing and able to engage in self-reflective national debates about their past violence. Moreover, such debates can lead (as shown by the case of Germany) to conciliatory remembrance. In this paper I also deduce a competing hypothesis (the "Unrepentant Democracies"). According to this view, a free marketplace of ideas will not necessarily eradicate myths as efficiently as many scholars believe. A free marketplace will supply the ideas demanded by its consumers, who often eschew self-reflection and guilt in favor of a more self-centered, and sometimes chauvinistic, historical narrative. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]