The Fair Process Counter-Effect: Procedural Justice and Protests in China’s School Admissions Reform

Abstract

How does procedural justice influence protest emergence? This question has been neglected as the procedural justice and social movement literatures have taken disparate approaches to explain people’s response to substantive injustices. This paper fills this gap by developing a theory of fair process counter-effect, namely that procedural justice facilitates collective action. Based on longitudinal fieldwork conducted from 2010-2019 on school admissions in China, I find that a bureaucratization reform had the unintended consequences of inducing previously nonexistent collective protests. Characterized by transparency and equal treatment, the post-reform procedures improved procedural justice perception among parents while also inducing protests, as the procedures enabled parents to more directly perceive substantive injustices, use public information to form protest narratives, and mobilize through shared experiences and grievances. By identifying the fair process counter-effect, this study reveals that collective action is facilitated by fair procedures and suppressed by unfair procedures. In doing so, this study bridges the justice-based and mobilization-based perspectives in explaining responses to inequalities.