While there has been a growing number of events of citizens’ non-compliance in recent decades, a significant proportion of the public still comply with the laws even if they are viewed as unjust or unreasonable. Why do some people obey unjust laws while others choose to resist? Furthermore, what determines judicial legitimacy? These questions are critical to the current rule of law society and modern democracy, as we witness the intensifying debate on the relationship between morality and legality and the debate about how unjust laws and institutions impose great challenges to modern democracy and undermine people’s trust in the political and legal systems.This dissertation is driven by the urgent need to address the above questions by exploring the interaction between individual and system-level factors affecting individual compliance behavior. Building on the existing literature, the study reviews the three important strands of compliance mechanisms: self-interests, legitimacy, and coordination, and comprehensively discusses how existing theories of complying with unjust laws interact with the three mechanisms. The study comprises three substantial chapters applying mixed methods to test these mechanisms empirically. In Chapter 3, the study researches the interaction between institutions and citizens by studying existing public opinion data, political cultures, and legal and political institutions across different countries. In Chapter 4, the study conducts a case study in China by controlling the political regime and legal institutions. It operationalizes two unique measures of culture by the interpersonal networks and the belief in retribution factors and compares the effects of perceived legitimacy, self-interests, and culture on individual compliance behavior. The findings of these chapters challenged the existing studies by finding that the expectation of procedural justice and rational calculation of benefits and costs, instead of political regime, legal institution, and culture, are more critical in affecting citizens’ obedience to laws.

To answer the second question, this study examines a factor that is typically ignored in the existing literature: judicial transparency. Chapter 5 of this study investigates a legal reform on courtroom videos in China by studying an original dataset of 480,000 online criminal trial video profiles. Unlike the existing findings that authoritarian institutions use the court as a tool to respond to the public and adopt a dual-track approach to pursue a popular agenda by strategically releasing the most popular concerning cases while concealing politically sensitive ones, I show evidence that transparency of local courts is determined by both their budget restraints and administrative mandate. The study also conducted a preliminary cross-designed survey experiment, which confirms the positive effect of judicial transparency on compliance: people are more likely to accept unfavored court rulings if the court releases the trial video and documentation, supporting my argument in the first question.

This project contributes to the literature on public opinion, law, and society by comprehensively reviewing and empirically testing the existing major theories on compliance behaviors in different institutional and cultural contexts. It does not only provide additional evidence to both the legitimacy and rational choice argument. More importantly, it reveals that, on some occasions, institutional legitimacy can triumph over self-interests and preference and affect people’s compliance with unfavored policies and laws, opening room for further academic discussion on the complicated relationship between compliance mechanisms and giving insights into public policy on judicial reform. This project also expands our understanding of the importance of judicial transparency to legitimacy. It becomes evident that judicial transparency, often overshadowed by factors like judicial independence, predictability, and fairness, plays a pivotal role, particularly in non-democratic contexts.