Conditional Justice: Evaluating the Judicial Centralization Reform in China

Abuse of power and corruption is prevalent in authoritarian countries. Does centralized management of courts serve to tie the hands of local bureaucrats? This article evaluates the effects of China’s two waves of reform aimed to centralize the management of local courts. The authors randomly sampled 3,993 adjudication documents from over 70,000 administrative litigation cases. Difference-in-differences estimations demonstrate that the reform does not improve civil actors’ probability of winning administrative litigations. When the police department is sued, the plaintiff’s odds of winning the litigation is 84.28 percent lower. Besides, a one unit increase in the defendant’s rank relative to the court decreases the plaintiff’s win odds by 42.99 percent. These findings reveal a logic of conditional justice and cast doubts on the effectiveness of China’s legal reform.