Essays on China's control over courts

Abstract

While some studies suggest that authoritarian regimes can emulate democracies by granting greater authority to courts to assist autocrats in achieving specific goals, the use of courts to oversee the bureaucracy presents a dilemma. On the one hand, the effectiveness of such internal oversight is questionable, given that courts in authoritarian states are often embedded within the very bureaucracy they are meant to supervise. On the other hand, autocrats must be wary of the expansion of judicial power, as establishing courts requires dictators to nominally adhere to certain rules, potentially limiting their authority. In other words, can leaders in authoritarian states effectively control the bureaucracy through the courts? And how do they control the courts themselves, which might constrain their power? This dissertation addresses the question of court control in authoritarian states through case studies spanning imperial to modern China.

The three essays in this dissertation examine different levels and forms of courts, addressing both political control through courts and political control over courts. The first essay explores how Qing Dynasty emperors balanced bureaucratic routines with ad hoc interventions in criminal cases. This essay treats the Ministry of Punishments as a specialized bureaucratic department with legal expertise and finds that it played a significant role in monitoring bureaucratic behavior. The second essay focuses on grassroots courts in contemporary China, specifically examining how political campaigns influence judicial decision-making. It shows that judges respond to informal control by imposing harsher sentences to demonstrate compliance, rather than improving consistency in rulings. The third essay explores agenda-setting by the Supreme People's Court and the Communist Party. It reveals that courts under more centralized autocratic rule exhibit greater agenda diversity and punctuation.

The findings contribute to the understanding of authoritarian governance and the role of courts in non-democratic contexts. Specifically, it sheds light on the autocrat's toolbox for controlling the judiciary and the strategies for using these tools, stressing the enduring importance of informal control mechanisms and the bounded nature of judicial independence in authoritarian regimes.

The dissertation also introduces several novel methodological approaches to analyzing legal texts, such as large language models, word embedding propensity score matching, and virtual judge simulation. These innovative methods demonstrate the potential for applying cutting-edge computational techniques to the study of legal institutions and judicial behavior, opening up new avenues for research in the field of law and social science.