Silent Protest on the Bench

Organised by

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

In this paper we investigate the effect of a 2022 war announcement and intensification of nationalistic propaganda on the sentencing disparities in Russian courts. We leverage the unexpected nature of war announcement in a regression discontinuity design, using February 2022 as a cut-off date. Our identification strategy is supported by the random allocation of cases inside of courts, which we also statistically check, and a series of robustness checks. To quantify the effect, we use a unique dataset on case-level and imply ethnicity of judge and defendant based on their names with a machine-learning classification model. Focusing on different ethnic pairs of judge and defendant in minor offense cases, we find that ethnic judges become more punitive towards Russian defendants after war. Thus, we find a 5.3 percentage points increase in probability to be sentenced to detention among this ethnic pair. This effect is particularly pronounced in localities with lower social trust, ethnic diversity, and democratic values (and higher predisposition to be affected by propaganda), suggesting that this change may be interpreted as a silent protest of ethnic minorities. These findings contribute to our understanding of how political shocks and propaganda intensification can affect ethnic discrimination within state institutions, particularly in autocratic settings.

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