Appreciate the Difference: The Role of Different Domestic Norms in Law and Development Reform: Lessons from China and Japan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Institutional models of development consider rule of law reform as one of the keys to improving the economies of developing countries. But the experiences of China and Japan indicate that advocates of this position have oversimplified the complexity of law and development reform. The author counters the view that China and Japan are Asian exceptions to the general rule that a Western conception of the rule of law is essential for development. Legal reforms to promote development need not embrace all the institutions that embody the ideals of liberal democracies, such as political freedom and human rights reform. Rule of law reform is effective if new legal institutions build successfully upon existing formal and informal social, political, cultural, and legal institutions.The author begins with a thin conception of the rule of law that is procedural rather than substantive, and indicates how the experiences of China and Japan underscore the importance of identifying domestic institutional norms that can be used as a starting point for designing effective reforms. One of the essential elements of China and Japan’s successful economic development is their adaptation of foreign conceptions of the rule of law to ensure compatibility with domestic norms and values. Their experiences suggest that some economies can function well without adopting a Western liberal democratic conception of the rule of law, and indicate the possibility of alternative approaches to development.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".