Suchergebnisse

This paper explores justice claims and legal recourse in disputes over land rights—a major source of unrest—in rural China. Local governments' search for fiscal revenue and the concomitant fiscalisation of land create the context for the recent wave of land disputes. The types of dispute and the contexts in which disputes arise shape the ways in which citizens seek recourse to threats to their property rights and shape the kinds of justice claim they make in the process. Citizens whose land rights are threatened by land takings orchestrated by local governments and outside developers are more likely to pursue both distributive and procedural justice claims in court than are citizens whose land rights are threatened by reallocation of land within the community. In the latter case, citizens are more likely to pursue distributive but not procedural justice claims through mediation. These patterns hold in both case study and survey evidence. Distributive justice is associated with the fairness of outcome of a dispute, while procedural justice is associated with fairness of the process of dispute resolution.

AbstractHow well do vignette designs capture actual behaviour in the real world? This study employs original survey data featuring both hypothetical vignettes and behavioural questions in order to assess the external validity of descriptive and causal inferences in survey experiments. The survey was conducted in a three-province, probability-proportional-to-size sample of 1,897 rural residents in China and focuses on the legal mobilization of citizens in response to grievances involving land rights. In terms of descriptive inference, we find that relative to the behavioural benchmark, hypothetical vignettes significantly over-estimate legal mobilization in response to a grievance, particularly for higher-cost actions like petitioning the government and litigating in court. We find that data from hypothetical vignettes affect causal inference as well, producing significantly different results regarding the effect of political connections and legal knowledge on legal mobilization. The study makes a contribution by identifying conditions under which hypothetical vignettes are less likely to produce valid inference. It engages a rich literature on disputing and legal mobilization in the field of Chinese politics and helps to resolve debates over the role of political connections and legal knowledge.