Collaborative Research: Transparency and the Rule of Law

学者和政策制定者一致认为，强有力的法律机构对于经济发展和民主治理至关重要，但在后共产主义国家和发展中国家改善法治的努力经常受到阻碍。最近的经验对成功的自上而下的改革几乎没有希望，因为根深蒂固的精英阶层处于有利地位，可以破坏这种努力。因此，该项目有助于研究法律和社会科学，并通过将注意力转移到由公民主导的提高司法透明度的创新自下而上的努力上来促进法律和社会科学研究以及制定有效的法治政策：由民间社会组织对法庭听证进行录像。鉴于乌克兰在俄罗斯和西方之间持续不断的地缘政治冲突中的突出作用，美国近年来投入了大量资源支持乌克兰的法治改革，这项研究对乌克兰的关注尤其及时。这项研究将包括一项大规模的现场实验。将开庭时间随机分配到“处理”(录像)和“控制”(禁止录像)两种情况，将有助于严格评估公民主导的透明度举措对法治关键要素的影响，包括司法结果、法官和检察官遵守程序规则的情况以及律师对司法公正和独立的看法。分析将利用对律师的调查和从乌克兰法院收集的行政数据。这项研究将产生一个新的数据集，涵盖乌克兰五个城市的大约2000个法庭审判。这一裁决反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Scholars and policymakers agree that strong legal institutions are essential for economic development and democratic governance, yet efforts to improve the rule of law in post-communist and developing countries have frequently been stymied. Recent experience offers little hope for successful top-down reforms, as entrenched elites are well-placed to undermine such efforts. This project therefore contributes to the study of law and social science and to the development of effective policies for building the rule of law by shifting attention to an innovative bottom-up, citizen-led effort to improve judicial transparency: the videotaping of court hearings by civil society organizations. The study's focus on Ukraine is particularly timely given that the United States has in recent years devoted extensive resources to support Ukrainian rule-of-law reforms in recognition of Ukraine's prominent role in ongoing geopolitical conflicts between Russia and the West. The study will consist of a large-scale field experiment. Random assignment of court sessions to "treatment" (videotaping) and "control" (no videotaping) conditions will facilitate rigorous evaluation of citizen-led transparency initiatives' impact on key elements of the rule of law, including judicial outcomes, judges' and prosecutors' adherence to procedural rules, and lawyers' perceptions of the judiciary's fairness and independence. Analyses will draw on surveys of lawyers and administrative data collected from Ukrainian courts. The research will result in a novel data set covering approximately 2000 court sessions from five Ukrainian cities.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.