[author]HE Hong-quan
[content]
HE Hong-quan: The Effectiveness of Administrative Adjudication System Reform ——Research Based on 580, 000 Judicial Documents
Doctoral Candidate, School of Law, Tsinghua University; Research Assistant, China Institute for Socio-Legal Studies, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Key Words: Administrative Adjudication System; Railway Transport Court; Administrative Court; Remote Jurisdiction; Tiao-kuai Relationship; Organizational Distance
1. Presentation of the issue
China's courts have the duty to hear administrative cases and supervise administration in accordance with the law, but the fulfillment of their duties is subject to a delicate power structure. In the system of "combination of tiao-kuai and kuai-based", the courts are subject to the "tiao" management of the higher courts and to the "kuai" leadership of the local party committees at the same level (and, to a certain extent, of the government as well). Under the jurisdictional system set out in the The Administrative Litigation Law of the People's Republic of China (hereinafter referred to as the Administrative Litigation Law), the vast majority of administrative cases are heard by the court of the place where the administrative agency is located. This makes it difficult for the local courts to adjudicate administrative cases neutrally, and the functions of the Administrative Litigation Law in resolving disputes and supervising the administration are thus greatly undermined. The question of how to reform the administrative trial system and enhance trial neutrality was once considered the "No. 1 issue" in the reform of administrative litigation.
On the premise that the court establishment remains basically unchanged, the main way to enhance trial neutrality is to take administrative cases away from local courts and give them to other courts for trial. After a long period of discussion, there are now two main options: first, to have administrative cases heard by an ordinary court of the same level outside the administrative division in which the defendant's government is located, that is, the "court in other places option". The second is to rely on the railway courts, which were converted in 2010, to set up cross-administrative courts to hear administrative cases. Many scholars advocate the establishment of a Chinese administrative court on this basis. In this paper, the second option is referred to as the "railway court option"; in 2015, in accordance with the relevant provisions of the judicial reform, each province could determine, in the light of local circumstances, whether administrative cases should be brought under the centralized jurisdiction of a court in other places or a railway court.
The question is, after so many years of reforming the administrative trial system, which option has worked better? Theoretical debates predate the reforms on the ground, but so far there is still a lack of a convincing and clear conclusion. Some empirical studies have compared the effectiveness of administrative cases heard in courts in other places or railway courts compared to local courts. However, the current study still has regrets: Firstly, it does not answer which option is more effective. Secondly, the method of judging which reform program is better by the results of previous studies is also unreliable. Because their samples and benchmarks are different in time, scope and type, the comparison results may be as difficult as "Guan Gong versus Qin Qiong". Thirdly, the classification is too coarse and the accuracy of the conclusions needs to be improved. For example, in the dichotomy of "railway courts or non-railway courts", there is no distinction between the two categories of "non-railway courts", namely, courts in other places and local courts, which may lead to bias in the conclusions. It can be seen that the concrete effects and differences of the reform program still need to be clarified, and if the stone is not clearly felt, a hasty crossing of the river will lead to a fall.
This paper uses 580, 000 first-instance judgement documents made public by the China Judgement Documents Network for the period 2015-2019 to assess the effects of the two reform programs. The results show that the two reform programs perform differently at different levels of courts. In the basic courts, the role of the railway courts in ruling in favour of the plaintiff is stronger than in the courts in other places; in the intermediate courts, the opposite is true. In terms of decision and judgement tendencies, railway courts are more likely to make a dismissal decision, while courts in other places are not. This empirical result differs from the previous theory that one reform program is better than the other. This paper argues that courts in other places and railway courts remain in a hierarchical nested and interconnected tiao-kuai system, where the ability of defendants to influence the courts is not a matter of presence or absence, but rather weakens with organisational distance. This paper will use "organisational distance" to describe the "proximity" of the defendant and the court in the organisational system, and explain the empirical results of this paper on this basis.
2. Research design
2.1 Research ideas
The idea of this paper is to examine the differences in the outcomes of the railway courts and courts in other places compared to the local courts over the same period of time:
Firstly, a comparison between reformed and non-reformed courts over the same period of time. There are two ways of comparing "reformed or not" and "before and after reform" in terms of assessment dimensions. Both have advantages and disadvantages, and the article uses the former. Although the latter is theoretically able to eliminate differences between courts, judges and other factors, it is in fact a comparison between two different groups of courts, as some courts did not hear the corresponding administrative cases before the reform. And, again, this makes it difficult to control for the impact of changes in other factors on adjudication before and after the reform. If this were to be done, either the sample would be narrowed by selecting only a small number of places, or a large number of variables would be added to the 580, 000 decisions. In the former case, the reliability of the findings would still be questionable, and in the latter case, the workload would be enormous and omissions would still be unavoidable. On the contrary, a comparison of reforms and non-reforms over the same period of time can exclude the effects of laws, policies, and so forth, before and after their implementation. The problem with this approach is how to control for differences between reformed and non-reformed courts, and again there is a risk of omitting some potential variables, but these differences can be controlled for as much as possible by adding variables.
Secondly, the local courts are used as a benchmark to measure the effectiveness of the decisions of the courts in other places and the railway courts. No matter what the reform program is, it will be compared with the local courts in hearing local cases. Therefore, this article will first measure the effectiveness of the courts in other places and the railway courts compared to the local courts. Afterwards, the results of the two will be compared using the local courts as a common reference system. If the opposite is true, then the empirical findings of the empirical study will not be the same if different reference objects are chosen, and if the courts in other places and the railway courts are compared directly with each other, it will lead to either better or worse results. This does not reflect the full picture of the reforms, as it is likely that both have had good results compared to the ordinary courts, but one has been slightly less successful than the other.
Thirdly, the effectiveness of the reform is measured by the outcome of the judgement. The core concern of the reform is whether the neutrality of the courts can be enhanced. The outcome of the judgement is the conclusion of the court's comprehensive review of the legality of the government's actions, which centrally reflects the trial of the case as a whole. The current interference of the sued administrative organ in the court trial is mainly manifested in the difficulty for the plaintiff to win the case and the low rate of winning the case. Therefore, if the reform programme improves the probability of plaintiffs winning their cases, this paper argues that the reform has had a positive effect.
Fourth, adjudication outcomes include first-instance judgements and rulings. In addition to judgements, about half of all administrative cases are concluded by adjudication. Previous studies have neglected adjudication. In addition to the result of government intervention in which the plaintiff loses the case irregularly, the case may also be excluded from substantive judicial review through irregular dismissal, thus dissipating the effect of the reform. For example, judicial policy has called for an increase in the number of cases filed, which has resulted in an increase in the number of cases filed, but more than half of the cases do not reach the courts substantively, but are withdrawn from the judicial process by a dismissal decision. Thus, if adjudication is omitted from the measurement of the effects of reform, the assessment may be incomplete.
2.2 Data processing
The data in this paper comes from 580,000 first-instance referee documents made public by China Judgment Document Network during 2015-2019. Through machine and manual identification, more than 40 features of the adjudication documents, such as trial courts, administrative acts, trial procedures, adjudication results, and litigation participants, were extracted. The sample pool excludes intellectual property administrative cases. These cases are generally under the jurisdiction of specialised courts, the defendant is mostly the State Intellectual Property Office or the Trademark Office, the threshold of case specialisation is high, and there are mainly civil disputes behind them. Although the defendant is the government, there is less government intervention. If intellectual property administrative cases are not excluded, the assessment results are rather not relevant. After that, the author collected the specific programmes of administrative trial system reform of 28 high courts, and based on this, marked on the variable table.
The manual comparison of 1‰ randomly selected original instruments with the variable table found that there was no systematic bias in data processing. The average plaintiffs' success rate in all years of this data is about 7 per cent higher than that of the Judicial Statistics Bulletin of the Supreme People's Court. This bias may be related to the rules for online disclosure of judgement documents, where certain rules prevent a portion of plaintiffs' unsuccessful documents from being uploaded to the China Judgment Document Network. This bias belongs to the external fixed bias, which indicates that the plaintiffs' winning situation is even less optimistic in practice. Since the article uses local court decisions as the reference object and adopts a relative effect criterion, this kind of fixed bias will not have a subversive effect on the study's conclusions.
2.3 Variables and Methodology
The dependent variable in this paper is the outcome of the judgement. There are two types of judgements: those in favour of the plaintiff or those against the plaintiff. The judgements in favour of the plaintiff are: annulment, alteration, performance of statutory duties, confirmation of illegality or invalidity, and compensation. If the court makes one of the aforementioned judgements, even if it does not support all of the plaintiff's claims, it is marked as a win. Because administrative litigation is the review of the legality of the administrative act, regardless of whether the plaintiff is satisfied, the aforementioned judgement denied the legality of the administrative act. The plaintiff lost the judgement has maintained the administrative act, dismissed the claim. The rulings are slightly more complex: dismissal of the lawsuit, inadmissibility is regarded as the plaintiff's defeat; other rulings such as withdrawal of the lawsuit, which do not involve the victory or defeat of any party, are regarded as neutral rulings. Details are shown in Table 1:
The independent variable in this paper is the trial court. There are three types of trial courts: local courts, courts in other places, and railway courts. The number of cases heard in each type of court and the average success rate of plaintiffs are shown in Table 2. Due to the extremely large number of classifications of administrative domains and types of administrative behaviour, this paper recodes them into two variables: scope of administration and type of behaviour. Their correspondence with specific administrative management fields and administrative behaviours is shown in Table 3. If a case involves more than one administrative field, the title of the adjudication document prevails.
The diagnosis of multicollinearity revealed that the variables type of court, location of the court and the defendant, year of filing and decision, and identity of the third party were subject to the problem of covariance. After eliminating the variables causing the covariance problem, the problem was solved and the variables retained are shown in Table 4. The reform also involves changes in the number of judicial districts. The courts in other places and the railway court programme may concentrate on cases from multiple administrative districts. The pressure of disruption on the courts from different numbers of judicial districts may be different. This was easily overlooked in the past. In addition, local socio-economic variables have been included to control for the impact of other factors on adjudication outcomes.
As the dependent variable adjudication outcome is a categorical variable, not a continuous and measurable value, based on statistical theory, this paper uses a Logit model fit in two parts: firstly regressing on the first instance judgement, and later adding the adjudication to it. With the addition of the adjudication, the dependent variable will change from a binary categorical variable to a ternary categorical variable, hence the use of Logit model extended regression. Equation (1) is the binary Logit model and Equation (2) is the multivariate Logit model used with the addition of adjudication to the dependent variable.
βxCourt is the regression coefficient for the independent variable trial court, which indicates the effect of court on the probability of occurrence of the event that the plaintiff wins the case. For example, β1 > 0, Court = Railway Court, which indicates that when the trial court is a railway court, it increases the probability of the occurrence of the plaintiff winning the case; and vice versa, it leads to a decrease in the probability of the occurrence of the event. Note that the Logit regression coefficients reflect the relative magnitude of the effect of the independent variable, not the absolute magnitude. The effect of a railway court or courts in other places on the probability of occurrence of a plaintiff's win is relative to local courts.
3. Empirical findings
3.1 Key findings
This section reports the empirical findings from the grassroots to intermediate courts and from judgements to decisions. Table 5 presents the regression results for judgements in grass-roots courts, using local courts as the reference category, and observing the effect of cases heard in other places or railway courts on judgement outcomes. In column (1) of Table 5, the regression coefficients are positive and significant for both foreign courts and railway courts. This suggests that cases heard in either field courts or railway courts are more likely to be decided in favour of the plaintiffs as compared to local grass-roots courts. Column (2) adds fixed effects to (1) and the results are the same as in column (1), with increased significance for railway courts.
[Note: (1) The reference category is local courts. (2) * stands for p < 0.1, indicating that the results are relatively significant; ** stands for p < 0.05, indicating that the results are quite significant; *** stands for p < 0.01, indicating that the results are highly significant. (3) The closer the R2 is to 1, the better the model fits, but the upper limit of the value in the logit model is uncertain and of little significance; when more than one model exists, reference can be made to compare the size of the goodness of fit. Same as below].
In order to further measure the difference in the strength of the impact of the railway courts and courts in other places on the outcome of the judgement, this paper standardises the regression coefficients of Column (2) using a formula calculated by Professor Guo Zhigang of Peking University through the PROC LOGISTIC program of SAS. The reason for using this formula is that fully standardised regression coefficients vary with the variance estimate of logit, which makes the standardisation of the same variable change in different models, but the formula does not have the above problem. The standardised regression coefficients for the grass-roots courts in other places and the railway courts were calculated to be 0.040 and 0.052, respectively.This shows that the relative role of the railway grass-roots courts in the plaintiff's success is greater than that of the grass-roots courts in other places.
Table 6 examines the differences in judgements between provincial and non-provincial capital railway grass-roots courts. There are 10 provinces where both provincial and non-provincial capital railway courts exist: Guangxi, Henan, Hubei, Hunan, Jilin, Jiangsu, Liaoning, Shandong, Shaanxi, and Yunnan. In Column (3), the regression coefficient for whether or not there are provincial capital railway grass-roots courts is not significant, which suggests that whether or not there is a provincial capital railway grass-roots court has no statistical effect on judgements.
Table 7 presents the results of the regression of the two types of intermediate courts judgements using local courts as the reference category. In column (4), the regression coefficients are significant for courts in other places but not for railway courts. After adding fixed effects in column (5), the significance of the regression coefficients does not fundamentally change for the field courts in other places, while they are negative and significant for the railway courts. This suggests that hearing a case in other places is more likely to result in a plaintiff's success than in local intermediate courts, but the positive effect of railway courts on plaintiffs' success is not clear.
Considering that this result is significantly different from most of the arguments in favour of administrative courts, Table 8 distinguishes between cases with various levels of defendants and examines the previous results specifically. Column (6) shows cases where provincial authorities are defendants, and although the regression coefficients for both field courts and railway courts are negative, the coefficient for field courts is insignificant. It can be seen that there is no significant difference between field courts in other places and local courts in provincial defendant cases, but railway courts are more likely to rule against the plaintiffs compared to local courts. Column (7) shows the cases in which municipal authorities are defendants, and the regression coefficients of both foreign and railway courts in other places are positive and significant. It can be seen that both are more likely to rule in favour of the plaintiff compared to the local court. Column (8) shows the cases where the county authorities are the defendants, and the regression coefficients of the foreign courts in other places and the railway courts are both positive and significant, and the difference between the regression coefficients of the two is not significant.
Tables 5 and 7 above report some interesting phenomena: (1) at the grassroots level, the presence of the head of the defendant in court is negatively correlated with a favourable judgement; at the intermediate courts, the relationship between the presence of the head of the defendant in court and the outcome of the judgement is not significant. This may be related to the size of the administrative division, the closeness of internal organisational ties, and the level of government under the rule of law, or it may be due to the fact that the phenomenon of defendants' principals appearing in court only after obtaining the judge's promise on the outcome of the verdict is more prevalent at the grass-roots level. (2) The presence of plaintiffs' and defendants' lawyers is positively associated with winning judgements at the grassroots level, while there is no significant relationship in the intermediate courts.Government lawyers have not yet been fully popularised during the five-year period 2015-2019, and government legal advisers were only formally introduced in July 2019 by the Opinions on Accelerating the Construction of a Public Legal Service System. Therefore, when defendants find it difficult to win a case, they are more likely to hire a lawyer, both to win the case and to share the responsibility of losing in the future; and defendants who enter intermediate courts have better financial resources and more regular representation by lawyers. (3) The greater the number of judicial districts, the more likely a plaintiff seems to be to win. It may be that the courts are given room to leverage and balance each other out among the subjects of multiple jurisdictions. Of course, the above findings are subject to further research, and these are not the focus of this paper, so they will not be expanded upon.
Table 9 presents the results of a multivariate logistic regression of first instance decisions, using local courts in other places as the reference category, and measuring the impact of foreign courts and railway courts on the outcome of decisions, which include plaintiffs' successes, defeats, and neutral decisions. Inadmissibility and dismissal decisions are categorised as defeats. Neutral decisions were dominated by dismissals, which accounted for 95.2 per cent of the total number of neutral decisions.
Column (9) is for grass-roots courts decisions. The regression coefficients for courts in other places are positive and highly significant in both the winning and losing columns. This suggests that field courts in other places are more inclined to make winning or losing decisions than neutral decisions such as dismissal, compared to local courts. Similarly, the positive and significant regression coefficients for the number of jurisdictions also suggests that an increase in the number of jurisdictions makes courts more likely to make winning and losing decisions. On the contrary, the negative regression coefficient for railway courts in terms of winning and losing cases suggests that railway courts hearing cases are more likely to make neutral decisions.
Column (10) shows intermediate courts decisions. The regression coefficients for courts in other places are positive and significant in both winning and losing cases. This indicates that foreign courts in other places are less likely to make neutral rulings compared to local courts. The regression coefficients for railway courts are negative in both winning and losing cases, with the regression coefficients in the winning column being insignificant and the losing column being significant. This can be argued that the railway intermediate courts are more likely to make neutral rulings compared to the local courts.
Column (11) is a sample of intermediate and grass-roots courts with the addition of the order variable "court level". The regression coefficients for courts in other places are positive and significant for both winning and losing cases. This suggests that foreign courts in other places are less likely to make neutral decisions than local courts. The regression coefficients for railway courts are both negative and highly significant. This indicates that railway courts are more likely to make neutral decisions compared to local courts. The regression coefficients for the number of jurisdictions are all positive and significant, suggesting that an increase in the number of jurisdictions makes neutral rulings less likely.
Table 10 examines the differences in adjudication between provincial and non-provincial railway grass-roots courts. In column (12), the non-capital railway courts seem to be more inclined to make a dismissal decision. Considering that the provincial capital railway grass-roots courts have larger caseloads, the caseloads of each court are added to column (13), and it can be seen that the provincial capital railway grass-roots courts are more likely to make a dismissal decision.
In order to ensure the reliability and persuasiveness of the results, this paper will test the robustness by transforming the model, changing the variables and splitting the sample. Due to space limitations, the following is a brief description:
Firstly, the Logit model is replaced by the Probit model for the regression, as a way to avoid that some empirical results are due to the regression model used in this paper. The Probit model can also be applied to the case where the dependent variable is expressed in dichotomous categories, which is mostly used for planned experiments in natural sciences. The Probit model results are generally consistent with the main findings. However, the positive effect of railway grass-roots courts compared to local grass-roots courts is difficult to take into account as the 95% confidence interval crosses 1.
Second, the ternary categorical independent variables (courts in other places, railway courts, and local courts) were changed into binary categorical variables and regressed two by two. That is, field courts in other places and local courts in other places and railway courts in other places and local courts in other places were regressed separately. The results are consistent with the main findings. The difference is that neither of the two results, that railway grass-roots courts are more likely to rule in favour of the plaintiff and that they are more likely to prefer to adjudicate, is significant. This may be a result of the large difference in caseloads between the railway courts and the local courts. The pseudo-R2 fit was not as good as in the previous section, and this speculation was verified in the subsequent reduced sample test.
Finally, the sample is restricted to tests in provinces where both reform practices exist. A total of 19 provinces and cities, including Henan, Jilin, Liaoning, Guangxi, Hunan, Shaanxi, Shanghai, Guangdong, Jiangsu, Shandong, and Anhui, have both courts in other places and railway courts in their centralised grass-roots courts. In the reform at the intermediate courts level, there are both railway and foreign courts in other places, including Fujian, Gansu, Guizhou, Henan and Liaoning provinces. The results of the test are basically the same as those found in the previous section. The difference is that there is a significant reduction in the difference in the relative strength of the role of railway grass-roots courts and grass-roots courts in other places in the plaintiff's success.
3.3 Summary
In summary, there are three main empirical findings:
First, overall, both courts in other places and railway courts are more likely to rule in favour of the plaintiff compared to local courts.
Secondly, at the grass-roots courts level, the relative role of the railway courts in obtaining a favourable judgment for the plaintiff is greater than that of the field courts, using the local courts as the reference system; at the intermediate courts level, the relative role of the field courts in obtaining a favourable judgment for the plaintiff is greater than that of the railway courts.
Thirdly, the courts in other places are more likely to rule in favour or against the plaintiff; the railway courts are more likely to make decisions such as dismissal; and the provincial capital railway grass-roots courts are more likely to make decisions on dismissal than the non-provincial capital railway grass-roots courts.
4. The "organisational distance" hypothesis
4.1 Proposition of organisational distance in a block structure
Established theories are insufficient to explain the empirical results of this paper. It is generally agreed that appropriate separation of the trial court from the defendant's administrative division can improve trial neutrality and reduce local government interference in administrative trials. Based on this, two propositions have been developed: firstly, trials are better in railway courts directly administered at the provincial level; secondly, trials are better in other places courts administered at the same level but in different administrative divisions. Both propositions argue for a hierarchical consistency of their own superiority. That is, if the railway court programme is better than the courts in other places programme, then this should be true regardless of the level of court, and vice versa. However, the empirical result is that there is no hierarchical consistency of reform effects between the two programmes and within the same programme.
The common rationale of the two reform programmes is ignored. Existing theory focuses too much on the formal and technical differences between the different reform programmes and considers them as two distinct things. However, either programme explores the "proper separation of courts from administrative divisions". On the one hand, the separation of the trial court from the "administrative division" is not a physical geographical separation, but an institutional separation of the court and the defendant in terms of the powers represented by the administrative divisions at each level. Local defendants are tried by courts in other places at the same level, which is a horizontal separation from the system of power of the defendant. The trial of a local defendant by a railway court of the same level is a vertical separation from the defendant's system of authority. This is because the railway courts are not part of the resident administrative division but are part of the provincial division. On the other hand, "proper separation" is separation in the three-dimensional structure created by horizontal and vertical power relations. The relationship between the court and the defendant is situated in a network of relationships nested in a hierarchy of small and large districts. The distance between them is not flat, but three-dimensional; not local, but holistic. To judge the degree of separation between courts and defendants in administrative divisions that have different regions at the same level and at different levels in the same region with a planar, localised framework of thinking, such conclusions are inevitably biased.
Administrative divisions are the embodiment of various power relations between the centre and the localities, and between the localities and the localities. We have a more concise and localised term for these power relations: "stripes". "Articles" generally refers to a system of departments with the same nature of work, functional counterparts, and in charge of a single area of business, according to the administrative level, from high to low. "kuai" refers to local governments at all levels, where "government" is big government, i.e., a comprehensive system of facets divided into administrative areas at all levels under the leadership of the Party. The relationship between block and bar graphically depicts the organisational logic of a mega country: a block of local administrative divisions together form a higher administrative division, these administrative divisions form the map of the whole country; and placed in each administrative division in the work of the upper and lower counterparts of the agency is like a needle and thread will be these "blocks" strung together to form a unified whole. A unified whole.
In the network of relationships formed by the intertwining of the blocks, there are differences in the relationship between the courts and different subjects, and the local party committees in the "blocks" are the core of the power relationship. The CPC is deeply integrated into and leads the national governance system, forming a dialectically unified governance relationship between politics and administration. Through party organisation and ideological leadership, such as the leadership of party groups over government organs at all levels, and the dual attributes of cadres and party members, the CPC's will and directives are broadly and effectively implemented within the government through democratic centralism. In the courts' tripartite relationship with higher-level party committees, their own party committees, and higher-level courts, the local "kuai" party committees are more influential. On the part of the higher-level party committees, court presidents are subject to a personnel management system of "one level above", with the appointment, dismissal, appraisal, and supervision of presidents resting in the hands of the higher-level party committees. With regard to the local party committee, on the one hand, the local party committee has the right to recommend candidates for the presidency, and the formal appointment of the presidency requires an election by the people's congress under the leadership of the local party committee. On the other hand, court personnel other than the president are appointed by the local party committee, and the approval of the construction of the court's office space requires the support of the local party committee. If the local party committee does not support the court, it is difficult to do a good job. As for the higher courts, they mainly have certain powers of supervision, advice and operational guidance. The "combination of block and block-based" describes the central position of the local party committee, with the courts being responsible to the party committee at the same level, and then the lower party committee being responsible to the higher party committee.
As the local party committee is the core of the block relationship, the closer the organisational subject is to the party committee, the greater its influence and the more diverse the channels of exerting influence. The closer relationship between the local government and the local party committee allows the government to use the party committee to exert both soft and hard influence on the courts, hard such as personnel appointments and dismissals, management assessment, and financial logistics, and soft such as political study, inspection and guidance, and combining work deployment with party committee decision-making. Compared to local governments, the relationship between local courts and local Party committees is slightly more distant, and this poorly ordered relationship makes the government's influence on court trials stronger.
However, the transmission and strength of the government's influence on the courts depends on the relative position of the two around the local party committee. Management has a concept called "organisational distance", refers to the degree of economic subjects in addition to the nationality of the institutional tradition, organisational structure, the degree of difference in organisational rules; organisational distance the closer, the smoother the inter-subjective cooperation, and vice versa, the more obstacles and conflicts. Similarly, there is an organisational distance between the courts and the government, and if the relative positions of the two change, the government's ability to influence the neutrality of the trial will also change. If the courts are further removed from the "kuai" of party leadership in a particular locality, then the government in that "kuai" will have less influence over the courts and fewer channels of influence. If the government still intends to effectively influence trial neutrality, it can only do so through a network of power relations with a common higher-level party government. However, the influence passed on to the court will be attenuated due to the greater organisational distance between the higher level "kuai" and the "kuai" in which the court is located. In sum, the hierarchical inconsistency in the effects of the two programmes, courts in other places and railway courts, can be explained by the inconsistency in organisational distance between the two programmes and within the same programme.
This paper uses the concept of "organisational distance" as a means of explaining and illustrating the degree of separation between the trial court and the defendant's administrative division in different reform programmes. The degree of separation between the trial court and the administrative division can be translated into the "proximity" of the trial court to the defendant's local party committee in the block structure. Organisational distance" in this paper refers to the relative position of the court and the defendant's local party committee in the tiao-kuai system, which reflects the degree of separation between the court and the local power system represented by the administrative divisions at all levels. The closer the organisational distance between the court and the local party committee to which the defendant belongs, the greater the ability and means of the defendant to influence the court's trial, and the more difficult it is for the court to maintain the neutrality of the trial. Conversely, the greater the organisational distance, the weaker the effect of the defendant's ability and means to influence the court's trial, and the greater the court's trial neutrality.
4.2 Organisational distance between basic and intermediate courts
On the one hand, how to implement the municipal government decision-making is the city, county party and government organs of the "political task" and "centre of work", all counties and district courts are no exception. County court president of the upper management level, administrative trial will affect the policy of the municipal party committee, is the president must consider the issue. Moreover, the city and county party and government system through learning and activities to improve and strengthen the judge's sense of the big picture, municipal governance considerations through the broader government links to grass-roots courts. This makes the "big picture awareness" of municipal governance absorbed by the grass-roots courts on their own and transformed into the conscious respect of the grass-roots courts in other places in adjudicating cases.
On the other hand, if the county court B disrupts the established policy of the municipal party committee in an administrative trial, the municipal party committee can either influence the court through the "kuai" system by the party committee of county B through the "focal point management"（归口管理）; or it can influence the court through the "tiao" system by the intermediate court, while county court judges suffer the negative impact on their performance appraisals. For court presidents who do not actively cooperate with municipal governance, the municipal party committee can also "replace" them by adjusting their positions and geographic areas.
When the defendant is a municipal government department, there is no difference in the structure of pressure transmission in Figure 1, whether Court A or Court B hears administrative cases. According to the Regional Jurisdiction of the Administrative Procedure Law, Court A hears cases of municipal government departments that are located in its jurisdiction, but the municipal government departments belong to the municipal "kuai". After the reform, the fact that Court B hears cases of municipal government departments does not change this structure; they are all under the governance of the municipality and are subject to the leadership of a common higher-level municipal committee. Regardless of who hears municipal department cases in courts A and B, they are subject to the same influences and concerns as described above. However, the adjustment of the court of jurisdiction breaks the inherent channels that have been formed between local courts and municipal government departments since the Administrative Procedure Law came into force, raising the cost of lobbying and reducing the influence of municipal government departments. This is both the advantage of grass-roots courts in other places over local courts, and the reason why the reform of grass-roots courts in other places needs to be adjusted periodically.
Railway courts are subject to less government influence than courts in other places. The grass-roots courts are separated from the county and municipal levels and are neither governed by nor accountable to the resident county committees. It is difficult for the discipline of municipal governance to reach the grass-roots courts directly. Railway grass-roots courts mainly accept the higher railway court leadership and management, the local city and county party and government organs do not have a direct counterpart organisational links, the implementation of municipal decision-making is not the railways grass-roots courts and their staff were asked to care about the issue. Even if the municipal governance tasks through various channels to the railway court, but the chain of transmission is too long, the railway court is only to adjudicate individual cases, the pressure is easy to be dissipated in the long distance of transmission.
The impact of differences in railway court locations is not significant. Tables 6 and 10 previously examined the impact of provincial capital railway courts on judgements and decisions respectively. In terms of judgement outcomes, whether or not the residency is located in the provincial capital does not have a significant effect. "A county official is better than an official in charge"; it is one thing to be familiar with the judges and be able to contact them, and it is another to be able to effectively put pressure on the judges and influence the administrative judgement. Regardless of whether the resident is in the provincial capital city or not, the two are the same in terms of organisational distance and are subject to the same institutional gravitational pull. As for the fact that railway grass-roots courts in provincial capitals are more likely to make a decision to withdraw a case, it may be related to the manpower and resources of the railway courts. The configuration and construction of non-provincial capital railway grass-roots courts is often weaker than that of provincial capital railway courts. For example, the Luoyang Railway Transport Court, which had a comprehensive trial division but no administrative division, was abolished at the end of 2021. Another example is that the Liuzhou Railway Transport Court, which has centralised jurisdiction over administrative cases, does not have an administrative division.
At the intermediate courts level, railway courts are "local courts trying local cases" within provincial "blocks", while courts in other places and defendants are outside provincial "blocks". Figure 2 depicts the organisational distance of intermediate courts. According to the provisions of hierarchical jurisdiction, intermediate courts hear administrative cases from governments above the county level, and the main focus here is on municipalities above the district level as defendants. In the case of foreign courts, the defendants faced by the foreign courts in other places are all municipalities at the same level, which are parallel to each other in terms of "blocks". The relationship between municipalities is dominated by intense competition, with more competition and less cooperation between localities at the same level. Municipal-provincial governance relationships are more distant than those between municipalities and counties, and the "municipal-county" system cannot be replicated exactly between provinces and municipalities, which reduces possible pressures from provincial "blocks".
In the case of the railway courts, the railway intermediate courts face stronger defendants than the intermediate courts in other places. The railway intermediate courts are located in provincial capitals, so their defendants are the provincial capital city governments as well as the provincial governments. In addition, some railway intermediate courts also accept cases in which provincial and municipal government departments are defendants, such as Guangzhou, Nanning, Lanzhou and Zhengzhou. In the case of the provincial government and its departments, the railway intermediate courts are not free from the framework of "local courts trying local governments". The railway intermediate courts are dependent on the provincial government for personnel management, financial resources, salaries and benefits. Moreover, the political status and influence of the intermediate courts in the provincial "kuai" is far less than that of the provincial government and its departments. Column (6) of Table 8 and the robustness test for railway courts show that railway intermediate courts are more likely to lose cases against provincial defendants than local courts. This corroborates the previous inference. In the case of provincial capital city governments and their departments, special organisational arrangements may make the railway intermediate courts more deferential. The fact that the municipal party secretary of a provincial capital city is also a member of the Standing Committee of the Provincial Party Committee makes it possible for the decisions of the municipal government of the capital city to originate directly from the core circle of power of the Provincial Party Committee. Considering the political status and influence of the party secretary of the provincial capital, the railway intermediate courts face far more concerns and pressures when municipal government policies come out of the central work of the party committee than when they face the municipal committee of an ordinary prefecture-level city. In addition, the railway intermediate courts are not in the system of the provincial capital city party committee, which deprives it of an institutional avenue to counter the defendant's influence. In contrast, ordinary intermediate courts in provincial capitals can report to the municipal party committees within the system for support to counteract defendant pressure.
4.3 Changes in the bar structure and withdrawal preferences
Compared to civil disputes, coordinating the handling of administrative cases is "a difficult bone to chew". In administrative cases, one party will almost always appeal. In 2017, for example, a total of 163,311 cases were concluded at first instance, as well as inadmissible and rejected cases that could be appealed, and 108,099 cases were received at second instance, which gives an appeal rate of 66.2% at first instance in administrative cases. This is several times higher than the 11.7 per cent criminal first-instance appeal rate and the 19.7 per cent civil first-instance appeal rate for the same period, which were derived from a similar methodology. In addition, administrative judges have much less room for manoeuvre than civil judges in reviewing the legality of administrative acts. Coordinating the handling of an administrative case is more difficult and time-consuming than adjudication. In the research interviews many judges have said: "mediation to withdraw the case than the judgement is much more laborious."
In this case, the railway court is more likely to make a decision to dismiss than an ordinary court, which is related to its case intake structure, resources, and capacity as a specialised court under the direct control of the "Article". At the railway court level, the pressure to co-ordinate the handling of cases is concentrated on administrative cases and not spread over civil cases. At the same time, the time and human resources of the railway courts are able to focus on administrative cases as compared to ordinary courts.
On the one hand, the pressure to coordinate the handling of administrative cases is concentrated and magnified in the railway courts, which are specialised courts. For one thing, the structure of the railway courts' intake is different from that of the ordinary courts, which makes the intensity of the pressure to coordinate administrative cases different. Of the three types of litigation, civil cases are the bulk, and administrative cases never exceed 2 per cent. Ordinary courts can make efforts in mediating civil cases, and there is no need to make efforts on administrative cases, which account for a small proportion and are difficult to coordinate. However, the railway court concentrated on administrative cases, other types of litigation volume is small, can only do in administrative cases to coordinate the work. Secondly, the "tiao" system has magnified the pressure on the railway courts to coordinate and handle. Ordinary courts can be in the local party committee at two levels and the higher courts strategically seek space for activities. Railway courts are single-function counterparts of the "Article" system, "Article" vertical management leads to the court system administrative and lower courts trial affairs to higher courts, which has always been a concern. The influence and control of higher courts over lower courts has increased as never before after the judicial reform. As a result, the task of coordinating and handling matters at higher levels is likely to occupy a more central position in the work of the railway courts.
On the other hand, railway courts are able to focus their manpower and resources on administrative cases as compared to ordinary courts. In addition to administrative cases, ordinary courts also handle a large number of civil cases. Administrative judges in ordinary courts have to help their civil court colleagues who work overtime day and night to handle cases. The large number of difficult civil and criminal cases also diverted the attention of the leaders of the ordinary courts from administrative cases. A judge transferred from an ordinary court to a railway court once said, "Substantial resolution of administrative disputes requires a lot of work. ...... Ordinary courts give very little manpower and resources to the administrative division." Railway courts, on the other hand, mainly hear administrative cases, while the absolute number of administrative cases is small, which gives railway court judges more ample time and energy to coordinate and resolve administrative disputes. Moreover, since the whole court is mainly dealing with administrative cases, the attention of the leadership as well as the support of colleagues in the same field provide great help in resolving administrative disputes through coordinated communication.
In addition, the court has the power to adjudicate cases, and already has the leverage to coordinate with the government. The railway court is more in the local "kuai" outside, but also to improve the use of the freedom and weight of this leverage - the government does not want to lose the case can only be coordinated with the court, through other means to make the court accept the government's intention of the cost is higher. In addition, in 2017, the Supreme Court issued a document to promote government-court liaison in bankruptcy cases, and the subsequent establishment of government-court liaison mechanisms by some railway courts may have also opened up channels for coordination with the government.
Conclusion
This paper analyses the effects of two reform programmes, railway courts and courts in other places, in the reform of the administrative trial system and tries to explain the reasons behind them in terms of "organisational distance". The study shows that, first, both reform programmes increased the likelihood of plaintiffs obtaining a favourable judgement. Secondly, the performance of the different reform programmes in the basic and intermediate courts has their own advantages. At the grass-roots courts level, the effect is more pronounced in the railway courts; at the intermediate courts level, the effect is more pronounced in the courts in other places. Third, the railway courts are more likely to make neutral decisions based on dismissal, while the opposite is true for courts in other places. Explaining the previous results goes back to our tiao-kuai system. Local courts are subject to the directives of local party committees and governments, and also endeavour to seek support from tilted resources. Courts in other places and railway courts are not in the defendant in the "kuai" system, the interference is naturally less than the local courts. However, interference with trial neutrality is not a question of whether it exists or not, but rather a question of how much. In a nested tiao-kuai system, no court is free from the influence of the organisational system, only the size of the influence depends on the relative positions of the court and the defendant in the tiao-kuai structure.
At the grass-roots courts, both the courts in other places and the local courts are under the umbrella of the city's party committee, and there is a strong link between city and county governance. When a case involves a core policy of the municipal party committee, the courts in other places inevitably need to respectfully yield. The railway court and the city and county levels "kuai" separated from each other, the municipal governance considerations are difficult to pass to the railway court. At the intermediate level, when the railway court faces a provincial defendant, it returns to the framework of "local courts trying local governments". At the same time, the special organisational arrangements between the provincial party committee and the municipal party committee of the capital city may make it necessary for the railway court to be more cautious when hearing administrative cases. Moreover, due to the division between the provincial and municipal levels, it also lacked institutional channels for direct communication with the provincial capital city committee. In contrast, the former provincial capital intermediate courts can directly seek support from the municipal party committee and its counterparts within the municipal "kuai" system to counteract pressure from the defendants involved. Intermediate courts in other places outside of provincial capitals are faced with defendants in prefectural cities in general, and the strong competitive relationship between municipalities makes it difficult for defendants to interfere with the courts in other places, and the pressure of defendants to interfere with individual cases across regions and levels can easily dissipate in a long organisational chain of transmission.
The preference of railway courts for dismissal decisions may be related to their role as specialised courts for "bar" administration. The pressure to coordinate the handling of administrative cases is magnified and concentrated in the railway courts as "bar" courts. At the same time, the human resources and leadership of the railway courts, as specialised courts, are focused on administrative cases rather than on other cases, such as civil cases, compared to ordinary courts, which provides the railway courts with the resources and capacity to fulfil their tasks.
The limitation of this paper is that, on the one hand, it is difficult to do a fine-tuned treatment and make an in-depth analysis of specific cases due to the huge amount of data. On the other hand, the empirical analyses only provide an answer, but it is difficult to explain the logic of social operation behind the answer. The claim of "organisational distance" not only needs to be supported by more systematic evidence, but also needs to be supplemented and improved by theoretical derivations of its generative conditions, operational logic and differential relationships. Nevertheless, this paper at least inspires the possibility that administrative trial neutrality is not a question of whether it exists or not, but a question of how much. The difference in organisational distance between different courts and defendants in a compartmentalised organisational system leads to a lack of hierarchical consistency in the effects of the railway court programme and the courts in other places. This not only shows that the complexity of the reform of the administrative trial system goes beyond the established theoretical presuppositions; it also shows that the railway court programme or the courts in other places programme may not be the final answer to the reform, and that there may be an answer that takes into account both the ideal and the reality ahead of the unknown, waiting to be explored and discovered.