The Role of Professional Background of Judges in Protest Cases Sentencing in Modern Russia

Existing research shows a consistent effect of judges' professional background on their judgments: on average, former prosecutors impose harsher judgments and more frequent prison sentences, while judges with experience as lawyers are less likely to sentence defendants to actual imprisonment. The social background theory (social background theory) of judges serves as the theoretical framework for these studies. However, we aim to test whether these effects would be observed in a non-democratic context in cases where state interests matter. As such cases, we consider decisions in protest cases. Information on professional background is obtained from the texts of judges' biographies on the website “Judges of Russia”. The study sample is 30,762 first instance court decisions on the most common parts of Article 20.2 of the CAO RF (parts 2, 5, 6.1, 8) (КоАП РФ). issued in 2017-2024. We build a series of regression models for different outcomes of court decisions (decision on guilt or termination of proceedings, decision on the type of punishment, amount of punishment, imposition of a fine less than the minimum) and find that in part of the models the professional background of judges turns out to be associated with the severity of the judgment. Limitations of the study include the availability of court decisions, the non-systematic nature of missing values, and the lack of information on the professional background of judges. Further directions of the research include the study of court decisions on protest cases in the second instance, more detailed work on the data on professional background of judges, as well as comparison of the effects of professional background in making decisions on protest cases with decisions on other articles of the CAO RF (КоАП РФ).