Informed Inattention: How Political Connections Undermine Judicial Responsiveness in China

The integration of information and communication technology (ICT) has significantly transformed the interaction between governments and citizens. While past studies have focused on how citizen appeals affect responses from public servants, less attention has been paid to the role of officials’ attributes in shaping government responsiveness. This paper explores how political connections influence responsiveness within the Chinese court system. Using a formalized principal-agent model, we argue that connected local judges, who have better information about central authority’s task priorities, tend to allocate less effort to routine tasks of lower importance. To test this hypothesis, we constructed a novel database containing biographical information of provincial chief judges in China and their online interactions with citizens from 2014 to 2020. Our empirical analysis shows that politically connected judges are less responsive in routine tasks of responding to citizens. This study offers new insights into how internal political dynamics impact the responsiveness of government institutions.