Judicial Alignment and Criminal Justice: Evidence from Russian Courts

Abstract: Abstract: This paper investigates the effect of informal ties between court chairpersons and prosecutors on the repressive implementation of criminal justice in a civil-law judiciary with prosecutorial bias. We use criminal law statistics of Russian regional courts for 2006-2010 and determine the alignment between chairpersons and prosecutors by measuring the length of their mutual career paths. We study fraud convictions and find that judiciaries with longer alignment are more effective in implementing the prosecutor’s preference for court repressivity. This preference depends on federal incentives shaping the career prospects of prosecutors. If prosecutors expect benefits from higher court repressivity aligned courts will sentence more defendants to prison, whereas, if incentives are absent alignment leads to less court repressivity.