Rule of law under authoritarianism -- local initiative, institutional adaptation, and regime resilience

Why did some local courts begin to accept and adjudicate cases of constitutional significance in the last decade, even though their decisions exceeded their constitutionally embedded authority? To what extent has such largely unexpected judicial activism changed the distribution of power in China's authoritarian rule, in particular, the courts' authority vis-a-vis other competing institutions, such as people's congresses or the local administration? What implications does this suggest for the prospect of establishing the rule of law/constitutionalism in China?;After examining each of these three variables, I conclude by addressing two immediate questions: first, the extent that we can expect that progress on all these dimensions would culminate in a systemic change and second, the implications for the evolution of the regime in authoritarian China. In particular, the dissertation argues that local experimentations and institutional competition are two major factors that contribute to the institutional adaptation of most local courts, which in turn contributes to the authoritarian regime's surprising resilience.;The significant actions by local courts have nonetheless been dismissed as merely some impulsive or curious exercises that need no further exploration. I instead argue that the surge in the last decade is not inconsequential. It actually derives from some institutional dynamics of the regime that have been largely overlooked by the current literature. Drawing on formal theories of judicial politics, the dissertation develops and tests the hypothesis that such constitutional initiatives are constrained by three institutional dynamics: (1) the political environment, that is, the openness of the local party state, measured by the development of local administrative litigations; (2) legislative constraint, that is, the activeness of local legislative supervision; and (3) the hierarchical relationship with upper courts, that is, the discretionary autonomy local courts enjoy from upper-level instructions. Local courts, as strategic players with aspirations to promote constitutional decisions, weigh their overall "judicial context," constructed by these three variables, to determine the specific approach of their attempts; the outcomes of such decisions, in turn, are determined by local variations in addition to these three dimensions.