Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Design of Legal Power in Authoritarian Regimes

在发展中国家，特别是在具有长期专制统治历史的新兴民主国家，稳定的治理是美国的国家安全利益。虽然法治被认为是稳定治理的标志，但这些地区往往缺乏法治。在过去的半个世纪里，美国在发展中国家建立民主法治的努力取得了有限的成功，屡遭失败。本项目旨在通过关注政府在威权巩固的关键时期所做的制度选择，揭示发展中国家不民主法律制度的起源，以及它们在向更民主治理过渡期间如此抵制改革的原因。在独裁统治的早期，一些独裁者将法律权威授予正式的司法机构，而另一些独裁者则选择建立临时的法律论坛。这些决定在确定发展中国家司法权力所在地方面具有持久的影响，最终影响到司法如何运作以及司法最终为谁服务。这对在独裁统治下保护人权有进一步的影响。因此，对于美国的政策制定者来说，确定专制法律体系中的利益相关者是在国外进行有效的针对性改革和建立民主法治的必要的第一步。为了了解发展中国家的专制法律制度是如何随着时间的推移而产生和演变的，本项目采用了混合方法分析，将定性过程追踪技术和统计分析相结合。原始数据将从包含撒哈拉以南非洲和东南亚发展中国家政治和法律发展记录的英国和美国档案中收集。档案研究将利用各种未充分利用的历史文件——包括政党文件、官方信函、司法登记、法院裁决和备忘录——来了解法律制度设计是如何在大部分发展中国家出现和发展的。使用过程追踪技术，马拉维、肯尼亚和缅甸等国家的案例研究将深入了解后殖民时期法律和专制权力的结构，并研究早期的法律决定如何持续到今天。档案数据也将有助于创建在各种法律论坛上裁决的案件的原始跨国数据集。该数据集涵盖了从独立到现代的时期，将有助于确定各国和各时期法律决策的一般模式。本研究项目有助于理解专制法律制度和独裁统治在大部分发展中国家的巩固。它将在三个重要方面加深对这些主题的理论和实证理解。首先，它将有助于确定，即使在向民主过渡之后，专制权力如何对法律机构的设计和运作产生长期影响。其次，它将引起人们对撒哈拉以南非洲和东南亚国家法律制度的政治影响的关注，这些地区已成为美国重要的经济和外交伙伴。第三，它将提供来自发展中国家国家建设关键时期的法律设计的新数据，这些数据可用于本项目范围以外的其他研究。这些数据将在调查结果公布后公开提供。

Stable governance in developing countries, especially in nascent democracies with long histories of authoritarian rule, is a national security interest of the United States. While rule of law is considered a hallmark of stable governance, it is often lacking in these regions. Over the past half-century, American efforts to build democratic rule of law in developing countries have encountered limited successes and repeated failures. This project aims to uncover the origins of undemocratic legal systems in the developing world and why they are so resistant to reform during transitions to more democratic governance by focusing on the institutional choices made by governments during key periods of authoritarian consolidation. During the early years of dictatorship, some dictators confer legal authority to the formal judiciary, while others choose to erect ad hoc legal forums. These decisions have lasting legacies in determining the locus of judicial authority in developing countries, which ultimately affects how justice operates and who it ultimately serves. This has further implications for the protection of human rights under dictatorship. For American policymakers, identifying the stakeholders in authoritarian legal systems is thus an imperative first step towards creating effectively targeted reforms and building democratic rule of law abroad.To understand how authoritarian legal systems in developing countries have emerged and evolved over time, this project utilizes mixed-methods analysis that combines both qualitative process-tracing techniques and statistical analysis. Original data will be gathered from British and American archives containing records on the political and legal development of developing countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. Archival research will leverage a variety of underutilized historical documents -- including party documents, official correspondences, judicial registers, court rulings, and memoires -- to understand how legal institutional design emerged and evolved across a large portion of the developing world. Using process-tracing techniques, case studies of countries such as Malawi, Kenya, and Burma will provide insight into how legal and authoritarian power was structured in the postcolonial period, and also examine how early legal decisions had lasting legacies that persist until today. Archival data will also be instrumental in creating an original cross-national dataset of cases that have been adjudicated in a variety of legal forums. This dataset, covering the period from independence to the modern day, will help identify generalizable patterns of legal decision-making across countries and over time. This research project contributes to the understanding of authoritarian legal systems and the consolidation of dictatorships across a large portion of the developing world. It will deepen theoretical and empirical understanding of these themes in three important ways. First, it will help identify how despotic power can have long-lasting effects on the design and operation of legal institutions, even after the transition to democracy. Second, it will draw attention to the political effects of legal institutions in countries of Sub-Saharan-Africa and Southeast Asia, regions that have become critical economic and diplomatic partners of the United States. Third, it will provide new data on legal design from a critical period of nation-building in developing countries that can be employed for other studies extending beyond the scope of this project. This data will be made publicly available upon publication of the findings.