University of Wisconsin–Madison

Tag: Wang

Wang (2024), “Embedded Supervision: China’s Prosecutorial Public Interest Litigation Against Government”

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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 …

Wang and Xia (2024), “State-Sponsored Activism: How China’s Law Reforms Impact NGOs’ Legal Practice”

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Yueduan Wang and Ying Xia. “State-Sponsored Activism: How China’s Law Reforms Impact NGOs’ Legal Practice.” Law & Social Inquiry, vol. 49, no. 1 (2024): 451–77. This study explores how attorneys and law-related NGOs navigate legal opportunities in China amid ongoing democratic backsliding. Following “law-based governance” reforms that professionalized the judiciary, expanded legal aid, and granted …

Li, Wang (2023), “Judicial Recentralization as Political Control: Evidence from the Judicial Leader Rotation in China.”

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Zeren Li, Zeyuan Wang, “Judicial Recentralization as Political Control: Evidence from the Judicial Leader Rotation in China.” Social Science Quarterly, vol. 104, no.4 (2023): 669–683.  Summary: This study analyzes how authoritarian leaders use the judicial system to solve the principal–agent problem in the government hierarchy. The authors argue that autocrats recentralize court personnel to enhance …

Wang (2020), “Pre-Empting Court-Civil Society Synergy: How China Balances Judicial Autonomy and Legal Activism”

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This article examines the evolving stance of Chinese administrations towards judicial autonomy and legal activism over the past two decades.

Liu, Su, Su, Wang (2024), “The Law or the Career? Autocratic Judiciaries, Strategic Sentencing, and Political Repression.”

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Howard Liu., Su, Ching-Hsuan Su., & Yi-Ting Wang, “The Law or the Career? Autocratic Judiciaries, Strategic Sentencing, and Political Repression.” Comparative Political Studies, https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140241290212, (2024) Summary: Why do judges sometimes act against autocrats’ will, even without judicial independence and tenure security? Contrary to the theory of strategic defection under weak governments, this behavior can also …

Wang (2025), “The Legality Trap: Legal Cooptation Under Authoritarianism”

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This study explores how legal advocacy in authoritarian China shapes environmental social movements by channeling their efforts into less radical, more state-aligned paths.

Wang (2020), “The More Authoritarian, the More Judicial Independence? The Paradox of Court Reforms in China and Russia.”

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Yueduan Wang, “The More Authoritarian, the More Judicial Independence? The Paradox of Court Reforms in China and Russia.” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, Vol. 22, no. 2 (2020): 529-560. Summary: Drawing conclusions largely from democracies, existing theories often positively associate judicial independence with political competition. This Article argues that a negative relationship exists …