Tom Ginsburg. “Administrative Law and the Judicial Control of Agents in Authoritarian Regimes,” in The Politics of Courts in Authoritarian Regimes. Edited by Tom Ginsburg and Tamir Moustafa, pp. 58-72. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Summary: One reason that dictators empower courts is to monitor and discipline lower-level administrative agents. This chapter applies a version of the well-known McNollgast framework to understand the evolution of administrative law in modern China. Administrative law became an attractive solution to principal-agent problems just as ideology was disappearing as an effective tool in the post-1979 period.