Document Type : Research Paper
Authors
1 M.A, Department of Political Sciences, Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran, Iran.
2 Assistant Professor, Department of Political Sciences, Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran, Iran.
Abstract
Introduction
The subject of this research is the judiciary's performance in the regeneration of political trust in Iran. The requirement for trust is that a person can make a positive prediction of the behavior and performance of institutions in the future. Citizens' political trust is dependent on getting the desired results from the government. If people feel that their problems will be solved in the future due to the performance of political institutions, their trust in the government will be preserved and regenerated. Some studies conducted in the last decade confirm that political trust amongst Iranian people has relatively decreased. The social capital measurement of the country, which was carried out in 2014 at the request of the National Center for Social Monitoring of the Ministry of Interior, reported people's evaluation of the future, which shows that only 24.2% of the target population believe that conditions will improve in the future, and 43.8% believe that their conditions will worsen.
In the regeneration of trust, especially political trust, there are two society-oriented or institution-oriented approaches: The first group are researchers who consider the regeneration of trust in the existence of some social and historical foundations of a country. Based on their research, they believe that the more people take part in some associations such as parents – teachers, or sports associations in a society, the greater trust will be developed from social and political standpoints. Based on their criticism, the second group suggests that the society-oriented approach imagines the role of the government in the regeneration of trust. They believe that the existence of such inclusive, fair, and impartial institutions as the police, courts, and health care contribute to the regeneration of trust from political and social perspectives, establishing the authority of the government
The standpoint of this research is close to the approach of the role of official institutions in the regeneration of political trust. In this research, we are trying to investigate the impact of institutions that exercise the authority of the government on political trust. Therefore, regarding the role of the judiciary as a judicial institution in the regeneration of political trust, to the best of our knowledge, we have found that there is a scientific gap in the research conducted in Iran. Thus, this article aims to evaluate the performance of an important and influential institution, namely the judiciary in building trust in government between Iranian citizens. According to what was raised, this article wants to investigate and answer this question; What is the role of the judiciary in political trust reduction in Iran?
Methodology
To collect data in this article, in addition to studying documents, the field method was used. In the field method, in-depth interviews were conducted with 10 senior lawyers of the judiciary to make the data reach theoretical saturation. In this research, the data analysis method is theme analysis at first, and the second step is process tracking. For the theme analysis, in the first stage, 216 basic themes were identified with the help of the initial encoding of the interviews' text. Then, in the next stage, these themes were reanalyzed with the help of axial encoding to identify 13 basic concepts such as "weakness of judges' knowledge", "Weak knowledge of lawyers", "Limited access to legal advice", "Lack of meritocracy among judges", "Guaranteed vote based on corruption in the judiciary", "Lack of transparency in the judiciary", "Feeling of corruption in the judiciary by people", "violations in the body of the judiciary at the level of employees and experts", "numerous and interpretable laws", "long handling of court cases and delays in proceedings", "lack of appeals due to the costs of proceedings", "threat to the independence of lawyers by the judiciary" and "influencing the court and limiting the independence of judges" in this research. Finally, and in the final analysis of the initial concepts, the following 5 categories were obtained, which are respectively "the presence of weakness in the expert staff", "the presence of corruption", "limitation of independence in the judiciary" and "structural weakness in the judiciary". These categories show that there is a disruption in access to a quick and fair judgment. In the subsequent stage, with the help of the process tracking method, the results obtained from thematic analysis about the effect of the quality of judgment on political trust were examined.
Discussion and Results
This research stands on the side that believes in a complex world and society, the existing order in the establishment of relationships between organizations and even people has a great need for a third party, which shows itself in the form of the government. When governments are supposed to play the role of a third party as a mediator, a virtue should be defined for them. A virtue that seeks to ensure the collective good, or in other words, is inclusive. Therefore, the important feature of a qualified government, being able to play the role of a third party (between people and organizations) to provide the collective good well, is to be impersonal. with this approach, there are a special type of political institutions that generate trust, governmental institutions that generate political, legal, and social equality and are based on the principles of fairness, honesty, and impartiality. Thus, to research the reasons behind political trust reduction in a society, one should look for signs of unfairness, dishonesty, or favoritism in political institutions. If the judicial system in a country is supposed to cause a decrease in political trust, it should make itself far away from the characteristics of inclusiveness. Two important indicators of inclusiveness in the judicial system are quick and fair access to this institution. The results of our investigations showed that the corruption and limitation of independence in the judiciary as well as some structural problems have disrupted access to quick and fair judgment in judicial courts, which has made the conditions that can contribute to making judicial institutions far away from the circle of inclusiveness. The more this distance is, the more effect on political trust reduction is conducted by the judiciary. Tracking the process stemming from the results obtained from thematic analysis in this research confirms that this disruption in quick and fair access has caused the performance of the judiciary to decrease political trust in Iran.
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