Juries, Public Trust in the Judiciary, and Judicial Performance: Evidence from Cross-Country Data

Abstract

The jury is an institution that has evoked both praise and criticism throughout its long history. Recently, it has also triggered debates in many countries as they reform their judicial processes. This paper summarizes data collected from 111 jurisdictions from different sources to analyze the impact of juries. I found that judiciaries in countries that conduct jury trials retain higher levels of public trust—yet this effect exists only in non-common law jurisdictions. The data also show that judiciaries that employ jury trials perform more effectively in the criminal justice system, especially in non-common law countries. A falsification test shows that the jury system is not correlated with judicial performance in creditor rights protection and contract enforcement cases, in which juries are certainly not involved in most countries, suggesting that its influence on criminal trial efficacy is not driven by country idiosyncratic features. The seemingly paradoxical patterns that are identified—that the jury, which is designed to constrain judicial power, ends up empowering the judiciary, and that laypeople, who are supposedly less proficient than professionals in deciding cases, make the judiciary more effective—indicate an internal connection between the jury as both a judicial body and a political institution.

Keywords: Jury, Public Trust, Judicial Performance, Empirical Analysis