Introduction
This paper questions whether vetting improves the trustworthiness of public institutions?
Implicit in this research question is a second question about the nature of the underlying
relationship between vetting and trust building. If vetting promotes trust, what is the mechanism
by which this happens, and under what conditions can this mechanism enhance the
trustworthiness of institutions? Conversely, if vetting undermines trust in institutions why, and
under what conditions does this hold true?
One is only concerned with the question of institutional trustworthiness if one believes
that trustworthy institutions enhance governance. It is the democratic governance goal that is
crucial to our understanding of effective transitions. Vetting activities, such as lustration, are
undertaken as part of the transition process to democratic rule of law. If institutions are made
more trustworthy, we associate this with an improvement in governance. However, this
connection cannot be assumed, it must be spelled. The mechanism by which trustworthy
institutions support governance practices is crucial to our understanding of lustration and other
vetting practices in the first place.
In this piece I define vetting as the screening of individuals based on past memberships,
positions, or affiliations, and their subsequent removal from office or from other bureaucratic or
academic positions. This could mean screening of individuals to ascertain if there is a need for
them to be removed, based on either their competencies or their previous actions. Or it could
mean a wholesale disqualification of individuals based on former memberships or positions held.
Since vetting has taken on a range of forms in different country contexts, there is also a range of
practices that broadly constitute “vetting.” For example, lustration is the uniquely Central and
Eastern European form of vetting, involving some combination of removal from office, truth
telling exercises, purging of people and information, and/or possibly punishment for past abuses.
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Convention