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

发展中国家的稳定治理，尤其是在拥有长期威权统治历史的新兴民主国家，符合美国的国家安全利益。虽然法治被认为是稳定治理的标志，但在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，但屡屡失败。该项目旨在通过关注政府在威权巩固的关键时期作出的体制选择，揭示发展中国家不民主法律制度的根源，以及它们在向更民主的治理过渡期间如此抗拒改革的原因。在独裁统治的早期，一些独裁者赋予正式司法机构法律权力，而另一些独裁者则选择建立特别的法律论坛。这些裁决在确定发展中国家的司法权力中心方面留下了持久的遗产，这最终影响到司法如何运作以及它最终为谁服务。这对在独裁统治下保护人权有进一步的影响。因此，对于美国政策制定者来说，确定威权法律制度中的利益相关者是创建有效有针对性的改革和在国外建设民主法治的必要的第一步。为了了解发展中国家的威权法律制度是如何随着时间的推移而出现和演变的，该项目使用了结合定性过程跟踪技术和统计分析的混合方法分析。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得到充分利用的历史文件--包括政党文件、官方信件、司法登记册、法院裁决和回忆录--来了解法律制度设计是如何在很大一部分发展中国家出现和演变的。利用过程跟踪技术，马拉维、肯尼亚和缅甸等国的案例研究将提供对后殖民时期法律和威权权力结构的洞察，并审查早期法律决定如何留下持续到今天的持久遗产。档案数据还将有助于创建已在各种法律论坛作出裁决的案件的原始跨国数据集。这一数据集涵盖了从独立到现代的一段时间，将有助于确定不同国家和不同时期的法律决策的概括性模式。这一研究项目有助于理解威权法律制度和巩固大部分发展中世界的独裁统治。它将从三个重要方面加深对这些主题的理论和实证理解。首先，它将有助于确定专制权力如何对法律机构的设计和运作产生长期影响，即使在向民主过渡之后也是如此。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，这些地区已经成为美国的关键经济和外交伙伴。第三，它将提供发展中国家国家建设关键时期的法律设计方面的新数据，可用于超出本项目范围的其他研究。这些数据将在调查结果公布后向公众公布。

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.