Ethnicity and Judicial Discrimination: Exploring punitive and sympathetic sentencing mechanisms through a survey experiment in Japan

Ethno-racial majority jurors often issue discriminatory sentences against minority perpetrators, particularly when the victim is co-ethnic. Despite extensive research, the mechanisms and non-Western contexts remain understudied. We propose that the mechanisms driving interethnic discriminatory sentencing may be either punitive, reflecting a motivation to punish out-group members, or sympathetic, indicating a tendency to favor in-group members. Our survey experiment involved 4,000 Japanese citizens acting as jurors in a hypothetical criminal case. Contrary to our initial hypotheses, we found no significant differences in sentencing based on the ethnicity of the perpetrator or victim. However, sentences were significantly longer when the perpetrator was Chinese and the victim was Japanese. Further analysis revealed that respondents who viewed immigrants as more threatening were more punitive toward foreign perpetrators, regardless of the victim’s ethnicity. These findings suggest that punitive mechanisms, driven by perceived threats, predominantly influence discriminatory sentencing, whereas sympathetic mechanisms play a lesser role.