Administrative Justice in Authoritarian States

Abstract

This chapter studies the institutions of administrative justice—administrative procedure, judicial review of administrative action, and administrative redress—in contemporary non-liberal democracies. It reviews the theoretical literature pertaining to administrative justice, with special emphasis on the principal-agent model. It examines two case studies of administrative justice, one national and one local, both from the People’s Republic of China, the world’s most populous authoritarian state: Mainland China and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. It reveals that authoritarian administrative justice is, at the end of the day, deeply paradoxical. Autonomous bureaucratic oversight mechanisms empower autocratic rulers to resolve agency problems through discovering information of maladministration, but remain permanently under the temptation to compromise the autonomy of administrative justice, so that the latter would never evolve into a threat to regime security.