Making Law Work in Autocracy: A Field Experiment on Civic Legal Mobilization in Rural China

This research examines the impact of the Village Lawyer Program on legal empowerment and political trust in rural China through a randomized controlled trial in 70 villages. The study evaluates two primary mechanisms: the source of advocacy and the structure of participation incentives. Advocacy is randomized between external lawyers and local village chiefs. Incentives follow an additive design where participants receive either a private material reward alone or a social recognition reward combined with the material reward, allowing for the isolation of the marginal effect of social norms. Data collected between July and December 2024 includes session attendance logs, legal service utilization records, and endline surveys measuring legal literacy and institutional trust. The findings aim to reveal how state-sponsored legal education influences dispute resolution behaviors and state-society relations under authoritarianism.