Date of Award

1-1-2024

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

Department of Sociology

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

Steven F Messner

Committee Members

Jianhong Liu, Jonathan Dirlam, Brandon Gorman

Keywords

China, decision-making, focal concerns, mixed methods, prosecutor

Subject Categories

Sociology

Abstract

Drawing on the focal concerns perspective, this dissertation attempts to answer three research questions: (a) What are the prosecutorial considerations most relevant to dismissal decisions in misdemeanor cases? (b) How are those considerations relevant to dismissal? (c) What are the variations of dismissals in misdemeanor cases with respect to individual-level characteristics? An exploratory sequential mixed methods design is used and proceeds in the following manner: (a) focal concerns relevant to the Chinese context are derived from qualitative thematic analysis on 324 public hearings on misdemeanor cases under the prosecutorial consideration of dismissal, and the original focal concerns perspective has been modified according to the findings from the qualitative thematic analysis; (b) measurement on the modified focal concerns is developed based on a dictionary generated by a natural language processing tool, Word2Vec, that combines findings from qualitative thematic analysis and natural language processing on 300,000 legal documents of misdemeanor cases; (c) the effects of modified focal concerns on prosecutorial dismissal of misdemeanor cases are tested by logistic regression models of over 70,000 misdemeanor cases. The qualitative thematic analysis has discovered three focal concerns under the Chinese context – blameworthiness, social stability, and system efficiency, each of which contains multiple sub-dimensions with different meanings from the original perspective. The logistic regression models have shown that variables used to measure the modified focal concerns are significant predictors of prosecutorial decisions to charge or dismiss. Individual disparities by age, education, employment status, and corporate ownership are discovered. However, several contradictory findings suggest directions for future research in China. The dissertation concludes with a brief discussion on the limitations of the focal concerns perspective and the utility of a cultural inquiry from the perspective of the sociology of punishment to understand the embeddedness of decision-making.

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