Yueduan Wang. “Embedded Supervision: China’s Prosecutorial Public Interest Litigation Against Government.” Regulation & Governance, (2024): 1-41.
This study challenges the assumption that diminished institutional autonomy necessarily weakens legal oversight in authoritarian regimes. Focusing on prosecutor-led public interest litigation in China, it shows that legal professionals can, under certain conditions, enhance their influence over state agencies that violate the law. Prosecutors have achieved compliance by combining legal pressure, informal negotiation, and political messaging in ways that align with the goals of local party-state authorities. This approach has allowed them to enforce laws more effectively at some levels of government. However, their ability to challenge more powerful or higher-level state actors remains constrained. The study highlights the complex and conditional role of legal professionals in backsliding democracies, where legal enforcement may advance within authoritarian structures but is ultimately shaped by political priorities and institutional limits.