Mass Publicity of Chinese Court Decisions: Market-Driven or Authoritarian Transparency?

This article discusses the online disclosure rates of Chinese court decisions, a measure of judicial transparency, based on a study of over 40 million court decisions disclosed on the designated website of the Supreme People’s Court of China between 2008 and 2016. We tested the online disclosure rates in various provinces against three determinants of government transparency suggested by existing theories: authority, market development level, and public trust in the judiciary. The results suggest that authority plays a decisive role, and the level of market development a limited role, in improving judicial transparency. We reject in part the hypothesis that public trust improves judicial transparency, or vice versa.