Tug of Legislative Turf War: Politics of Law-Making in Contemporary China (1978-2023)
Senior Thesis
[Coming soon!]
When Law Bites: A Theory of Executive Capture in the Legislature
Working Paper (from Senior Thesis)
How does the executive respond to tightening judicial checks in bureaucratic authoritarian regimes? I argue that ex post constraints on administrative behavior do not uniformly limit executive discretion but can backfire, inviting executive capture of legislation and endogenously reconfiguring legislative power. Using China as a case, I show that the 2014 rule-of-law reforms, marked by expanded judicial and supervisory oversight on administrative enforcement, led executive agencies to shift discretion upstream, embedding more delegation clauses and loosening statutory limits. Drawing on an original dataset of all Chinese statutes enacted from 1979–2023 and a law-level difference-in-differences design comparing executive–drafted and legislature-drafted laws before and after 2014, I find that delegation to the executive rose sharply and asymmetrically: executive–drafted laws contain roughly 38 percent more full-discretion clauses post-2014, with the strongest effects in policy domains facing higher litigation and supervisory exposure. These findings demonstrate how rule-of-law campaigns in executive-dominant regimes can reconfigure executive–legislative relations by displacing bureaucratic discretion into legislation. Moving forward, I plan to investigate the administrative regulations produced under the loose statutes to examine how delegated discretion is exercised in practice.
“Performative” Law and Order: Signaling Competence with Legislative Productivity
Working Paper (from Senior Thesis)
What explains the periodic surges in China’s production of administrative regulations? I argue that cyclical rises in regulation-making are driven by performance-signaling, following institutional restructurings of China's State Council. With old institutions merged into or replaced by new ones, new leaders are installed. To signal superior performance over their predecessors, the new leaders tend to push for the passage of abundant new regulations. Drawing on an original dataset of regulation-making activities and historic State Council restructuring periods, I employ a DID design, comparing changes in legislation output in treatment periods (following leadership changes) to control periods (no institutional restructuring). By analyzing both the volume and content of laws passed during these periods, I assess whether the surge in legislation yields substantial policy change or merely reflects administrative signaling. This finding offers new insights into legislative behavior, showing how bureaucratic incentives shape legislation. In my next steps, I plan to investigate the economic consequences of excess in administrative regulations.
Convergence and Divergence by (Institutional) Design: Comparing State-Making, Revolution, and Industrialization in Britain and France
Term paper
How do elite structures shape divergent paths of state formation and long-run political development? This paper advances a theory of dual power structure, arguing that the relationship between economic power and status power—and the institutional channels that link or separate them—determines whether early state-building produces stable representative institutions or violent political ruptures. When institutions allocate status in ways that converge with and reinforce economic power, as in England, elite strata consolidate into a cohesive and dominant social group capable of institutionalizing property protection, driving capitalist development, and sustaining gradual political reform. Conversely, when institutions allocate status independently of economic power, as in France, fragmented elite blocs compete to deconstruct and redefine each other’s normative basis of authority, generating recurrent crises of legitimacy, redistributive revolutions, and structural conflicts that undermine fiscal extraction, block capital formation, and increase the likelihood of revolutionary breakdown of the Ancien Régime.
Using comparative historical evidence to compare England and France, I show that property institutions governed by the wealth-responsive common law and fluid aristocratic boundaries in England fused economic and status power in the hands of the landed upper classes, enabling negotiated constraints on the crown and laying the foundations for early capitalist development. In France, by contrast, a monarchy-centered system of Roman law codified estates and privileges from above, making noble status a royal legal creation insulated from economic bargaining. The consequent sharp divergence between economic and status elites undermined fiscal extraction and generated escalating conflict among the monarchy, nobility, and a propertied peasantry. These tensions culminated in revolutionary institutional collapse and a reconstruction of political order that shaped a more state-led and egalitarian ideological context for subsequent industrialization—distinct from England’s capitalist, market-driven path.