Reports
Discussion Papers
No.929 Do Chinese Judges Go Green?: Quantitative Approach to Measure Eco-Civilization Thoughts in Judgements
by Kosei Yamada
March 2024
ABSTRACT
The Communist Party of China requires judges in the People’s Court to apply “Eco-Civilization Thoughts” in adjudications. Notably, some Chinese judges cite ideology in their judgements; however, the entire picture is ambiguous owing to the lack of observation and analysis of the large collection of judgement texts. In this study, we aimed to empirically measure the ideological expressions of “Eco-Civilization Thoughts” in the reasoning of judgement using the Latent Semantic Scaling (LSS) method. The trained LSS model successfully captured the distinctive features of eco-civilization thought in reasoning. The result of our measurements suggests that eco-civilization has become an integrated part of reasoning; however, the sharp fluctuation of the polarity score indicates the inconsistency of the judges’ reference to the concept of eco-civilization. Further studies are required to identify the cause of fluctuation and the effect of ideological integration.
Keywords: Eco-Civilization, Quantitative Text Analysis, Judicial Documents, Ideology, Latent Semantic Scaling
JEL classification: K32, K41
PDF available at http://hdl.handle.net/2344/0002000877
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