The Influence of Gender of the Defendants and Judges on the Decision on Guilt, Type and Extent of Punishment in the Political Protest Cases in Russia

The paper examines the influence of the judge's gender and the defendant's gender on the guilty verdict and the type and level of punishment under different parts of Article 20.2 of the Administrative Code of Russian Federation - for participating in and organising protests. In addition, socio-demographic characteristics are considered as control variables. The research question is what effect the gender of the judge and the gender of the defendant have on the type and level of punishment: for example, do female judges sentence more harshly than male judges, and do female defendants receive more lenient sentences? The data used were court decisions from the Moscow City Court website, which we collected ourselves, processed using NLP methods, and converted into tabular data on sentences. Regression analysis of the data was used as a method of data analysis, namely three regression models: a binary logistic model for the type of sentence, a linear model for the extent of arrest, and a multinomial model for the extent of fine.