Working Papers
Brown, Junius F. 2026. “Authoritarian Legality at the Grassroots: How Chinese Local Governments Use the Law as a Shield to Justify State (In)action.”
Abstract:
In recent years, scholars have shown growing interest in authoritarian legality, particularly in China but also in other regimes. One persistent challenge in this literature is that scholars continue to define “authoritarian legality” in different ways, leading to varying judgments about where it is present and how it works. In this paper, I propose a new definitional framework for relating legality to rule of law, and show that this framework captures dynamics that the “rule by law” approach overlooks. In particular, I uncover similarities in how legality functions at the grassroots in democratic and authoritarian regimes, and I highlight the importance of legality in principal-agent control of civil servants across regime types. I illustrate these claims using mixed-methods analysis of two thousand letters and replies on China’s Message Board for Leaders, an online complaint and citizen service platform.
Elevator pitch: Introduces the concept of “Law as a Shield,” linking it to literature on rule of law and legality in democracies and autocracies.
Status: Presented at APSA 2025 as “Law as a Shield: How Chinese Local Governments Use Legality to Deflect Public Pressure.” Currently under R&R.
In Progress
Explanatory Responsiveness Survey Project (ERSP)
Description:
This project is a follow-up to the “Law as a Shield” working paper above. It is currently divided into two complementary parts.
The first is an online survey which I designed over the course of the 2025-2026 academic year and distributed during the summer of 2026. This survey presents Chinese netizens with a variety of scenarios in order to examine their preference for rigid or flexible application of the law, adapting Kawashima’s Japanese survey instrument to the Chinese social context and adding new vignettes to test the influence of additional contextual factors. I also ask respondents about their history of political participation and their political attitudes, including a version of Altemeyer’s Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale also tailored to the Chinese context. My immediate question is whether authoritarian personality traits are associated with a preference for rigid or flexible application of the law, and whether this depends on the scenario in question (e.g., whether the law constrains the citizen, the state, or the state’s ability to help the citizen). The results of this survey arrived at the end of July, and as of August 2026 I am still analyzing the results.
I split this survey project in two in order to gather preliminary data while I refine the design of the second half. In the second survey, I will use a conjoint survey experiment design to present respondents with different kinds of government excuses in order to compare the effectiveness of these excuses at muting dissatisfaction with government replies that cannot substantively solve a problem. I presented early versions of this survey experiment at APSA 2025 and at a departmental brown bag talk at DKU in 2026, and I am continuing to refine it.
By default, I plan to turn each of these surveys into a standalone research article, targeted at empirical journals on China and/or law and society. Given the stability afforded by a tenure-track position, however, I hope to integrate them into a larger book project on Chinese attitudes toward law, authority, and government responsiveness. In addition to allowing me to consolidate my findings in a single place, such a book would also provide space for me to more deeply explore theoretical connections and normative implications to which I have thus far only been able to allude.
Status: Data collection for the first survey is complete, and data analysis is in progress; I am still refining the follow-up survey experiment.
