Baseline leniency versus severity responsiveness in prosecutorial charging decisions: Evidence from China’s drunk-driving cases

Abstract Prosecutorial charging decisions are a pivotal gateway into the criminal process, yet charging-stage consistency is difficult to assess because comparable, large-scale data are rarely observable. Drawing on a nationwide corpus of prosecutorial case documents from China’s high-volume drunk-driving enforcement, this study asks whether local jurisdictions differ mainly in baseline willingness to prosecute or in how strongly they translate legally salient case seriousness into charging outcomes. We estimate multilevel logistic models that allow both baseline prosecution propensity and responsiveness to blood alcohol concentration (BAC) to vary across basic-level jurisdictions, while accounting for defendant characteristics, prior record, case circumstances, procedural factors, and year effects. The results indicate pronounced geographic heterogeneity on both dimensions. Jurisdictions differ not only in their overall inclination to file public prosecutions for otherwise comparable cases, but also in the steepness of the BAC–prosecution relationship, implying heterogeneous practical thresholds. Baseline propensity and severity responsiveness tend to move together, yet they do not collapse into a single “toughness” ranking: which jurisdictions appear stricter depends on case severity. Disparities are most consequential near the margin, where small differences in local screening thresholds produce large differences in who enters the criminal process. These findings highlight charging as a key site where spatial inequality can be generated and suggest that standardization and oversight should focus on severity-conditioned decision rules, especially for borderline cases.