The Fall of the Patron Saint of Justice: How Judge Movement affects Court Rulings in China

Abstract

This paper provides empirical evidence that challenges the doctrine of “judicial exceptionalism” — the presumption that courts are much more resistant to patronage networks due to professional training and formal institutional constraints. I develop a theoretical framework that models strategic interactions between judges across court hierarchies and demonstrate how personnel rotation policies can create opportunities for patronage relationships between appellate and trial court judges. Using 133 million court verdicts from China’s judicial system, I exploit quasi-random variation in judge transfers between court levels to identify patronage effects. My difference-in-differences estimates reveal that when judges transfer from intermediary to basic courts, the reverse-or-remand rate of the basic court declines by 8.4 percentage points. Through placebo and robustness tests that account for alternative mechanisms, I establish that these patterns reflect welfare-reducing patronage rather than efficiency-enhancing mentorship. The findings demonstrate that formal institutional safeguards may be insufficient to prevent patronage networks from influencing judicial outcomes; instead, they may inadvertently facilitate judicial malfeasance through relationship-building across court hierarchies. These results provide novel insights into how informal networks can penetrate formal institutions and have important implications for the design of personnel policies in judicial systems.