Local Pushback on Legal Transparency: Evidence from China Judgments Online

• In Event: State Actors and Public Goods Provision under Democracy and Authoritarianism

Abstract

The Chinese government devoted considerable efforts to enhancing legal transparency between 2013 and 2021, exemplified by the establishment of the centralized platform China Judgments Online (CJO), where legal documents from various levels of the judicial system were publicized. The significant reduction in the number of legal documents made publicly available since 2021 reveals a remarkable pivoting away from this decade-long, center-led efforts. This paper documents the geographical disparity of legal transparency even before the recent self-dissolution of this reform. With an original database of over 100 million judicial judgments, we propose a measurement of legal transparency at the county and prefectural city levels. We explore possible determinants of legal transparency and identify the influence of intra-/inter-jurisdiction competition, economic openness, and political purge during this time on local legal transparency. Using both supervised and unsupervised machine learning models, we also study the topical differences between regions with various degrees of legal transparency and derive possible content of hidden documents in regions displaying lower legal transparency.

Authors

• Jiahua Yue

• Yuchen Cao, Princeton University