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The Effects of National and Local Funding on Judicial Performance: Perceptions of Russia's Lawyers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Vanessa A. Baird  and
Debra Javeline
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Abstract

Courts that perform well are the cornerstone of the rule of law and democratic development. When courts are perceived as legalistic, fair, impartial, and independent of the influence of extrajudicial actors, aggrieved individuals are more likely to pursue litigation over other, potentially unlawful, alternatives. Using original data from surveys of more than 1,800 randomly sampled lawyers in 12 Russian cities, we investigate the effects of perceived government funding and power diversification on a variety of indicators of perceived judicial performance. We find that, according to lawyers, financial dependence on the national government has no independent effect on judicial performance, but financial dependence on local governments has consistently significant negative effects. We also find that diversified political power has consistently significant positive effects on perceived judicial performance, probably because the diversification makes courts seem less vulnerable to unified pressure from political actors.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , June 2010 , pp. 331 - 364
Copyright
© 2010 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

A version of this article was presented at the 2008 meeting of the American Political Science Association. For thoughtful collaboration on questionnaire development and survey administration, we thank the Institute for Comparative Social Research (CESSI) and especially Anna Andreenkova. For very helpful feedback on an earlier draft, we thank Barry Friedman, Peter Solomon, Lydia Tiede, and Alexei Trochev.

References

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