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Abstract
This study took advantage of newly released court sentencing documents to evaluate the effect of judges' gender on juridical decision making in China. More specifically, it focused on whether the gender of judges and gender composition of a collegiate bench exert effects on sentencing outcomes after controlling for legal circumstances. All rape sentences issued from 2012 to 2015 and uploaded to China Judgements Online (CJO) were retrieved. Each judge's gender was estimated using the naive Bayesian classifier. To compensate for possible misclassifications of gender and the gender composition of a collegiate bench, a measurement error model (MC-SIMEX) was implemented for both count (length of sentence in months) and binary (whether the defendant received probation) outcomes. Although our results reveal no consistent differences in sentencing outcomes between male and female judges, we found female-dominated collegiate benches to be associated with shorter sentences. This article not only furthers scholarly knowledge of the role a judge's gender plays in the juridical process in China, but provides analysts with an effective way of applying text-mining techniques to social science research.
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The past few decades have witnessed a worldwide increase in the number of female judges.1 This surge in female judges has raised the question of whether there is a gender effect on sentencing, particularly in sex crime cases, such that female judges evaluate cases differently from their male colleagues. On the one hand, judicial professionalism is believed to render a judge's decision making immune to the influence of personal characteristics. On the other hand, as gender is rooted in socialization processes that are accompanied by gender-specific experiences, attitudes, values, and risk assessments,2 it is unreasonable to assume that male and female judges would arrive at exactly the same juridical decisions, all else being equal. Differences in sentencing outcomes may be particularly perceptible in cases of sexual harassment, sexual assault, and rape because women are more likely to be, or to identify with, the victims of such offenses.
Although many studies have investigated the effect of judges' gender on sentencing outcomes,3 their results have been mixed and limited in two respects. First, most have been conducted in countries that operate under a common law system (especially the United States), with very few focusing...