Ethnic Bias in Russian Courts

• In Event: Law as Mechanism of Authoritarian Rule

Abstract

There is rich body of scholarship examining racial bias in the US, but we know significantly less about possible biases in other contexts. This paper examines the role of ethnicity in Russia, a country with more than 190 ethnic groups and a predominance (80%) of one group. Ethnic discrimination is well-evidenced in housing market, labour relations, and military service.. In this paper, we examine this further by looking at criminal cases. Does ethnicity of a defendant matter in criminal proceedings? If so, what kind of ethnicity is important? What happens when a judge belongs to the same ethnic group as the defendant?

We examine these questions using original data on the universe of road accident cases (art. 264 of the Criminal Code) adjudicated by Russian courts between 2012 and 2022. The paper focuses on the Volga-Ural region, which combines regions with the predominance of one or several ethnic groups. We connect geo-position of each court with rich regional level data on ethnic composition, electoral turnout, socio-economic characteristics. Controlling for case-level characteristics, we examine whether ethnicity plays a role in criminal sentencing; and whether it plays a different role depending on ethnic composition of the region, or ethnicity of a judge.

Author

• Yulia Khalikova, U of Hamburg (Germany)