Chapter 2 explores each of the country cases in this project, namely the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine, and Albania. The chapter provides historical details of the transitional justice reforms in all twelve countries from 1989–2013, covering lustration, file access, public disclosures, and truth commissions. This material is then used to place each country case within the typology developed in Chapter 1, according to whether the measures were expansive and included compulsory employment change, limited and included largely voluntary employment change, informal and largely symbolic, or actively rejected. The chapter provides variable conceptualization and operationalization specifics to be used in the subsequent statistical analyses, including three different lustration variables, a truth commission variable, and timing of reform variables. It provides qualitative, comparative historical details to justify the classification of countries according to the primary independent variable, namely lustration and public disclosure programs.
