The paper presents results of the qualitative–to–quantitative narrative analysis of the transitional remembrance policy in South Africa during Nelson R. Mandela’s presidency. It refers to findings on the structure of political applications of historical interpretations to the issue of national identity reconstruction during democratisation. Therefore, the paper considers a degree in which remembrance story–telling was used to legitimise, justify, explain and promote the Rainbow Nation, the inclusive and non–racial vision of South Africa’s ’ideal self’ based on Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s theology of Ubuntu hoping. It investigated these relationships on eight levels – legitimisation of new elites, presence of former elites, transitional justice, social costs of transformations, promotion of new standards, the symbolic roles of democratisation, need for national unity and the new state’s identity in international politics. Moreover, the paper introduces a draft comparison with other cases of transitional remembrance policy – Chile, Estonia, Georgia, Poland and Spain – and it offers the structural model of the use of historical interpretations in South African transition, as well as discussing it with reference to the general model of the transitional remembrance policy. 

The paper presents results of the experimental study on the government's remembrance policy, attitudes towards it, and the influence of remembrance narratives. It discusses individual differences of participants on three different grounds: (1) interest in history or politics, and level of historical knowledge, (2) features of cognitive motivation measured by the need for closure questionnaire: preference of order, desire for predictability, discomfort with ambiguity, closed-mindedness and decisiveness, and (3) response to the presented narrative, including inspired emotions and an assessment of a story. Collected data and research observations offer an interesting and valuable insight into relationships between various factors and citizen's support for the remembrance policy. They also lead the team to formulate three conclusions which may be used to develop theoretical understandings of this aspect of politics within political science and related disciplines.

The research report presents results of the comparative study on relationships between remembrance narratives and transitional identity policy. It is based on the qualitative-toquantitative narrative analysis of six cases: Chile, Estonia, Georgia, Poland, South Africa, and Spain. It discusses internal correlations within the structure of transitional remembrance policy with reference to three levels of analysis: the general level, the areas of impact (objectives of the policy) level, and the fields of impact (aims of the policy) level. As a result, it offers two models – the General Model of Correlations, and the Model of Internal Correlations. These two drawings show main features of remembrance story-telling during democratisations, and they develop present understandings on the way in which historical arguments may influence transitional identity reconstruction.