| Summary/Abstract |
is study took advantage of newly released court sentencing documents
to evaluate the e ect of judges’ gender on juridical decision making in
China. More speci cally, 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 classi er. To compensate for possible misclassi cations 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 femaledominated collegiate benches to be associated with shorter sentences. is
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 e ective way of applying text-mining techniques to social science research.
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