In recent years, the party and state have built a complete institutional framework to improve national governance capacity and the governance system at a strategic level. However, in the practice of local governance, the governance of litigation sources, with the original intention of “reducing the burdens” often ends up “increasing the burdens.” Why does governance of litigation sources, as an institutional measure aimed at reducing burdens, unexpectedly become an institutional obstacle that increases burdens in the practice of local governance, and why does this unexpected consequence occur? These are the core questions that are addressed in this article. In order to answer the above questions, this study looks at the case of the people's court in W District of C City from a competitive perspective of the political and legal logics and the judicial logic to deeply explore the mechanisms and logics behind the inability to achieve a burden reduction during implementation of grassroots source governance. The article attempts to understand the deep structure and operational logic of litigation source governance in China in terms of the competition and interactions between the political and legal logics and the judicial logic. We hope to clarify the key position of litigation source governance in China's judicial governance system and to explain how it may help to build a more harmonious and just social order. We find that the political and legal logics and the judicial logic affect each other in the governance of litigation sources, and they influence each other in source governance, establishing both horizontal and vertical pressure transmission paths. At the horizontal level, the “decentralization of small powers” and the shortage of governance resources have created considerable structural pressures. At the vertical level, the assessment pressures by the higher authorities and the expectations for the grassroots to “serve the people” further deepen the burdens at the grassroots level. The horizontal and vertical mechanisms interact with each other, intertwining and colliding, ultimately leading to unintended consequences during implementation of litigation source governance. The article attempts to engage in dialogue and expand the existing political theories. First, the competitive interactions between the political and legal logics and the judicial logic to a certain extent reveal the interactive relationship between politics and administration. Based on a discussion of the competitive relationship between the political and legal logics and the judicial logic, the article also attempts to provide theoretical reflections on the complex interactions between political logic and administrative logic. Second, as a continuation of Fengqiao's experience in the new era, litigation source governance has a certain political color, and when it is embedded in the soil of formalistic justice, it will naturally produce a mutually exclusive reaction. This process essentially ends as a collision between the political and legal logics and the judicial logic. The story of “seeking to reduce the burden but not being unable to do so” in this article is a reflection of the competitive relationship between the two logics. An understanding of the competitive relationship between the two logics will provide some clues about the operational logic of litigation source management. These two logics are also of far-reaching significance for understanding other judicial and political systems, such as the jury system, the adjudication committee system, the mediation and arbitration system, etc., as well as other possible logics that need to be further understood and explored.
Sun et al. (Sun,) studied this question.