Courtroom Live Broadcasting in China: Its Effect on Judicial Legitimacy

• In Event: Poster Session II: Comparative Politics

Abstract

Since 2013, the Chinese government has been promoting judicial transparency by publishing court decisions and broadcasting court trials online. How does this reform on judicial transparency, in a form of mass media, affect people’s trust in the legal system? Existing literature on the rule of law in non-democracies generally argues that authoritarian regimes can use legal reform to improve public efficacy and encourage people to channel disputes through legal institution instead of contentious actions.
In this paper, I propose an alternative theory to the existing literature: increasing transparency in court trial process polarizes people’s existed predisposition of the judicial system. I conduct an experiment with 200 Chinese college students to test the effect of courtroom video, finding that increasing transparency in criminal trial is likely to reinforce people’s belief of procedural justice and increase their confidence in the legal institution, while not affecting the people who has a belief of substantial justice. Additionally, I do a separate survey experiment with a national sample on the Chinese political ideology. Preliminary result shows that when controlling legal knowledge, moderate transparency of court trial has the greatest and positive effect on trust in the court; however, this effect diminishes when complete transparency and full information are given to the respondents.
These two studies, together with the data of three other national surveys, show the complicated relationship between judicial transparency and regime legitimacy. The legal reform does not necessarily achieve what the government intended to. Instead, it may cripple judicial legitimacy and improve the support for democracy.

Author

• Erico Yu, University of Iowa