Authoritarian Courts as an Institution of Control

• In Event: Law and Courts in Authoritarian China

Brief Overview

We test the effect of petitioning as a political action on the trial result. We apply text-as-data and machine learning methods to administrative rulings from China and find that litigants who petitioned their cases are more likely to lose in trials.

Authors

• Jongyoon Baik, University of Pennsylvania

• Eddie Yang, University of California-San Diego