Reducing Corruption in Courts: Effects on Corruption and Economic Development

Corruption in judiciaries erodes the rule of law. If the wealthiest can bribe judges, this means not everyone is equal under the law, leaving ordinary citizens vulnerable. Since 2017, I have worked with the Kenyan judiciary on nationwide experiments to speed up court processes. Using a unique dataset called the Daily Court Return Template (DCRT), which tracks over 14 million case-level observations across all Kenyan courts, we aim to improve efficiency. Our new project targets corruption within the courts. A 2019 survey of court users revealed that 73% believed judges were neutral in their decision, but responses varied widely, ranging from 47% to 96% depending on the court. We plan on conducting continuous web-based surveys to capture real-time perceptions of corruption. Moreover, by analyzing the DCRT dataset, we can identify corruption indicators like unnecessary delays (a form of corruption) and high appeal rates, which often signal dissatisfaction with judicial decisions. Our idea is to display these measures on an official-looking visually appealing document, called the “one-pager”, specific to a court. We will send these one-pagers to judges in a randomly selected half of the courts in Kenya. The Kenyan judiciary does not wish to associate these one-pagers with explicit financial rewards or sanctions, but wishes to send the signal that this behavior is now being monitored, in a sense increasing the probability of detection p (p.54, GI Review paper). We have evidence from our previous randomized experiments that delivering feedback in this way can alter judges’ behavior.