Marieke Zoodsma presented the first results from our Political Apologies Database in a session organized by the Transitional Justice and Human Rights Standing Group at the European Consortium of Political Research conference. This database – which will be available online in the near future – contains close to 300 political apologies that have been offered since the Second World War for human rights violations. The database includes information about key characteristics of these apologies, which we will use at a later stage to analyze cross-national differences and similarities in how political apologies are expressed and received.
In her presentation, Marieke discussed the coding of these characteristics such as the form (e.g. where, when, how, and by whom was the apology offered?) and the content of the apology (e.g. did it include an acknowledgement of wrongdoing, an acceptance of responsibility, an expression of remorse, a promise of non-repetition?). Our data show that in the past decades, there has been an exponential rise in the number of apologies that have been offered for human rights violations – especially since the end of the 1980s (see figure below). These findings suggest that we do indeed live in an age of apology, as some scholars have suggested. An interesting discussion followed Marieke’s presentation.
