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current Duma represents your interests?,” assuming that a respondent who feels represented by
either the executive or the legislature is relatively advantaged; (3) number of Relatives or friends
litigating; (4) Perceived likelihood of winning the lawsuit, a four-point scale based on litigant
responses to “How likely is it that the court will decide in your favor?” and non-litigant
responses to “If you had taken legal action, how likely is it that the court would decide in your
favor?”; (5) the Severity of the grievance, a five-point scale based on self-reporting of bodily
harm from the hostage incident, with “one” representing no harm at all and “five” representing
death of a loved one; and (6) Blaming the federal authorities, a dichotomous measure of whether
the victim named any federal authority as first or second most guilty for causing his or her
problems from the incident. Other variables were tested for their possible effects on litigation
but were not significant in either bivariate or multivariate analysis and are omitted here for ease
of presentation.
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[Table 2 here]
As Table 2 shows, the perceived fairness of the hearing is not positively related to
litigation, as the procedural justice literature suggests it should be. Instead, perceived fairness is
negative and statistically significant. A victim who believes the court will consider the
plaintiffs’ side of the story is less likely to litigate than a victim who holds no such belief.
It is possible that the above finding could be driven by our choice of measure for
perceived fairness. Further analysis shows that this is not the case. For example, we substituted
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For example, we initially expected that Western exposure might be influential and that Dubrovka
litigants might have been inspired to litigate because they spent time in or are familiar with other
countries where litigation is common. However, neither Western travel nor English, French, or German
language proficiency are significant explanatory factors for litigation.
Convention