Effect of High vs Low Stakes on Legal Mobilization: A Survey Experiment in China

• In Event: Comparative Legal Mobilization

Abstract

The comparative and empirical literature on law and rights notes that citizens often take no action in the face of rights violations, particularly in authoritarian context. Rights defined by law are not “self-enforcing.” Conditional on a threat to land rights, what do land-right-holders do? Under what conditions do citizens decide to take legal action (negotiation, mediation, petition, litigation, protest)? The proposed paper employs an original survey experiment implemented by face-to-face enumerators in a representative sample of 24 villages in two provinces of China. Respondents (n=1245) were randomly assigned to respond to a high stakes or low-stakes land dispute vignette. The analysis takes into account other theoretically relevant factors including political connections, legal knowledge, party membership, education, income, etc., to assess the hypothesized political economy explanation (high vs. low stakes) of legal mobilization. It presents the findings in the context of the comparative and multi-method literature on disputing and in the context of survey questions and follow-up interviews that capture respondents’ real-world experience with grievances over land claims.

Authors

• Susan Whiting, University of Washington

• Zhaowen Guo, University of Washington