Abstract
People obey the law because they citizens think it is legitimate (Tyler 2006b), and trust is the key that makes the legal system work (Tyler and Huo 2002). The jury system promotes public trust in the justice system through lay people’s participation. In the current study, the authors investigated the relationships between citizens’ trust in the social system, general trust, feelings of legitimacy for the justice system, and other social variables. The survey was conducted in March 2013 through the Internet, and 1609 Japanese people responded. With these data, the authors tested relational models of the factors that determine citizens’ trust in the legal system and relationships among these factors. In the latter half of this chapter, the author deals with the problem of trust. Trust in the legal system is one of the important factors that make the legal system work. The saiban-in system aims to promote “popular base of the justice system,” according to the opinion paper issued by Justice System Reform Council. This aim can be interpreted that the system aimed to promote trust in the justice system of the general public in Japan. The author investigated whether introducing the mixed jury system promoted trust in the justice system of the people in Japan, by secondary analyses of the datasets of Japanese General Social Survey conducted in 2008 and 2010. As the system inaugurated in 2009, those datasets were obtained before and after introducing the system. Compared those two datasets, the author found that “trust in the law courts” of the people increased in 2010 than trust in 2008. With adjusted residual analyses, the author found that in the answers in 2010, the frequencies of “(trust) very much” increased significantly, while the frequencies of answers “seldom (trust)” and “no answer” decreased significantly. Adding to those results, the author conducted multiple regression analyses to specify the magnitude of the introducing jury system on the trust in the justice system. People’s trust in the law courts increased after initiation of the trials by saiban-in. And a regression analysis showed that the attitude towards the saiban-in system affects positively trust in the law courts. When we compare before and after the introduction of the saiban-in system, we find the people thought that introduction of the saiban-in system does not make the legal system unreliable, and people choose saiban-in system more if they were accused of a crime. The implications and future directions on the results were discussed..
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Notes
- 1.
Trust here means people’s positive attitudes toward others and expectation of positive reactions from others. In experimental studies, that is described as “cooperation” among participants (e.g., Yamagishi and Yamagishi 1994)
- 2.
The term society here is understood to mean an aggregate of persons living together in a more or less ordered community.
- 3.
The second half of this chapter was first appeared in the 2016 annual conference of Law and Society Association. The paper was “Fujita, Masahiro (2016). Does introducing mixed jury system promote trust in justice system in Japan? Discussion based on the secondary analyses of Japanese General Social Surveys and Matsumura et al. (2012).” The paper was presented in the 2016 Annual Meeting of Law and Society Association, held at New Orleans Marriott Hotel, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, June 3.
- 4.
Researchers who are interested in secondary analyses of the datasets of past JGSS’s can receive the individual response data which have been collected by the JGSS Research Center in SPSS format upon request. See http://csrda.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/
- 5.
In the English document (JGSS Research Center at Osaka University of Commerce 2010), the “Form of Register” is described as “Register of electors”, which seems to mean that they sampled from voter’s lists which are held by Election Administration Committees. In the Japanese document (JGSS Research Center at Osaka University of Commerce 2010), they sampled from basic residents registers. Those two kinds of lists cover largely the same populations, among the people who are twenty years or older, as the voters’ lists complied based on basic residents registers. The differences between those lists come from whether the people have voting rights in that specific municipalities. For example, every resident can exercise his / her voting right just after three months their moving into the municipalities.
- 6.
There were no questions concerning saiban-in system in JGSS 2008 .
- 7.
The original question was written in Japanese as: 「2009年5月に開始された裁判員制度(殺人・放火・誘拐などの裁判に一般の人が参加する制度)を、あなたは支持しますか。」
- 8.
This is not shown in results section, in a multiple regression model with independent variables regarding the political attitudes (five-point scale of conservativeness) and stratification belonging consciousness scale (five-point scale from low to upper classes), these two variables were not significant. Both conservativeness and class identification did not have relationships with the trust in the law courts.
- 9.
The original question is: 「裁判員による裁判の導入によって、裁判が信頼出来ないものになる」.
- 10.
The original question is: 「あなたが身に覚えのない犯罪を犯したとして、裁判にかけられたとします。もし選べるとしたらあなたは裁判員による裁判と職業裁判官のみの裁判のどちらを選びますか。」
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Appendices
Appendices
Appendix A: Hypotheses
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Hypothesis 1: There should be a path from the general trust to trust in social institutions.
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Hypothesis 2: Authoritarian personality promotes trust in the justice system, as those who are inclined to authoritarian personality would have respectful attitudes towards the authoritative social system like justice system.
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Hypothesis 3: Life satisfaction affects general trust, and via general trust, life satisfaction has an influence on trust in the justice system.
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Hypothesis 4: People in higher social class are inclined to be more satisfied with their lives.
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Hypothesis 5: Sense of fairness positively affect trust in the justice system.
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Hypothesis 6: Legitimacy in the legal system positively influences on trust in the legal system.
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Hypothesis 7: Feeling of fairness brings about feeling of legitimacy in the legal system.
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Hypothesis 8: Feeling of equality should be affected by general trust.
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Hypothesis 9: Social class has a positive effect on feelings of equality.
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Hypothesis 10: Interest in the justice system may promote trust in the justice system.
Appendix B: Questions Selected
Three items from California F scale (Adorno et al. 1950)
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1.
The most important thing to learn for children is obedient attitude toward their parents.
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The young are too weak in these days. They need more strict discipline and strict regulation.
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It is polite to be patient to listen to our seniors even they say the things that we don’t like.
Six items from Social Dominance Orientation scale (Pratto et al. 1994, p. 760) (Words between parentheses are back-translated from paraphrased Japanese items, which are used in our questionnaire)
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Some groups of people are simply not the equals of others.
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Increased economic equality. (Economic equality in our society is increasing.)
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Increased social equality. (All humans should be treated equally.)
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Equality. (The world is equal.)
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If people were treated more equally, we would have fewer problems in this country.
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6.
It is important that we treat other countries equal.
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Fujita, M. (2018). Lay Participation System and Trust in the Justice System. In: Japanese Society and Lay Participation in Criminal Justice. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0338-7_4
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