Does Judicial Independence Matter? A Study of the Determinants of Administrative Litigation in an Authoritarian Regime
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Lawsuits against the government form a part of the regular functioning of legal systems in democratic countries, and responding to such lawsuits an unavoidable part of governance. However, in the context of authoritarian regimes, administrative litigation has been viewed as a distinctively valuable institution for promoting the rule of law and individual rights. Moreover, the judiciary is portrayed as the keystone to this institution and to the rule of law in general: the more powerful and competent is the judiciary, the more it is able to “constrain government” through judicial review. Through empirical and comparative analyses of over two decades of administrative litigation in China against one of the state’s essential branches, tax collection, I challenge the utility of this normative conception of administrative litigation. Using conceptual tools that apply across legal systems and regulatory areas, I show that while litigant behavior as well the regulatory environment offer useful explanations of litigation patterns such as case volume and the plaintiff win rate, the relevance of judicial quality is barely discernible. This highlights the intuitive idea that judicial review can operate only when private parties bring suit, and whether and when they will do so cannot be taken for granted. In countries with weak legal systems, the rule of law may fail in certain basic ways that even a competent and well-subsidized judiciary cannot remedy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".