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Judicial enforcement deputies: Causes and effects of C hinese judges enforcing environmental administrative decisions
Author(s) -
Zhang Xuehua
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
regulation and governance
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.417
H-Index - 45
eISSN - 1748-5991
pISSN - 1748-5983
DOI - 10.1111/rego.12070
Subject(s) - enforcement , punishment (psychology) , context (archaeology) , deterrence (psychology) , payment , deterrence theory , compliance (psychology) , business , judicial review , certainty , regulatory authority , public economics , economics , law and economics , law , political science , public administration , finance , psychology , social psychology , paleontology , philosophy , epistemology , biology
This paper explores how and why C hinese courts became involved in regulating pollution by aiding administrative agencies in executing sanction decisions and collecting pollution levies. It also studies the effects of their regulatory involvement, both in terms of deterrence inferred from available information, as well as the compliance behavior of regulated actors defined as payment of regulatory penalties. It finds that judicial involvement in regulatory enforcement proved to be short‐lived and depended on a particular context at a particular period of time when a regulatory need coincided with administrative and financial judicial needs and particular judges. The paper also finds that court involvement enhanced deterrence in terms of certainty of punishment and to some extent the severity of punishment; however that deterrent effect was undermined by the close relationship between the courts and the regulated entities as fines and levies were almost always negotiated. In effect, deterrence increased the number of compliers paying levies without increasing the depth of compliance in terms of their full payment.