Welcome!

My research interests revolve around comparative judicial politics, political institutions, and contentious politics. More specifically, I am interested in how the state and the society interact with each other through judicial tactics.

I defended my dissertation, in the title of “The State Against Citizens: Blame-shifting Litigation and the Judicialization of Politics in Taiwan,” and received my master degree in political science from National Taiwan University in May 2017. Departing from existing literature paying considerable attention to how societal actors engage with the state through the power of law, the master dissertation builds a novel state-centered argument that administrative agencies in Taiwan tend to use the civil lawsuits to control and curb the momentum of social movements.

I argue that the rationale for the bureaucrats to file the lawsuits to citizens lies in a self-interested motive with the aim of evading accountability from other executive branches. ​This argument is borne out by one-year intense participation in anti-eviction movement and a more in-depth investigation in closed-factory protests through national and local archives. I have presented this research in Law and Society Association Annual Meeting, LSA 2017 and American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, APSA 2017.

Concerning quantitative methods training, I have taken a variety of courses in quantitative methods such as game theory and logistic regression and participated in the Institute of Political Methodology (IPM) summer camp to learn a series of courses in time-series cross-section analysis. In the final presentation of IPM, I presented an article turning over its head of political insurance theory. By using the TSCS analysis, I argue that the political elites initiate judicial reform as a means of buying insurance for the fear that the future ruling elites will purge them through judicial tactics. I contend that it is instead judicial independence reform that makes opposition parties more potent in the electoral arena so that the ruling elites have to compromise with them, and test this argument through time-series cross-section analysis.

I earned my BA degree in political science and a minor in law from National Chung Cheng University.

For further information, you can reach me via email: yurufu125 [at] gmail <dot> com

Research

THE STATE AGAINST CITIZENS: Blame-shifting Litigation and the Judicialization of Politics in Taiwan

Conference Paper

• Paper Presented at APSA 2017; LSA 2017.
• APSA 2017 Travel Grant.

Master’s Thesis DOI: 10.6342/NTU201703881 Library Link

• 2017 Best Dissertation Award of Taiwan Political Science Association (TPSA)
• Leichen Fellowship for Excellence Dissertation, Taiwan (2017)
• Chiho Fellowship for Excellence Dissertation Proposal, Taiwan (2015)

A large body of literature on judicialization and legal mobilization has demonstrated that courts have played an increasing role in social change and policy– making over the past decades. Little attention has been paid to the judicialization of policy issues, especially to how the state interacts with the society with judicial tactics. Departing from the literature of legal mobilization, which is mainly society-centered, I propose a novel state-centered story that administrative agencies in Taiwan tend to use the litigation to control and curb the momentum of social movements. I argue that the rationale for why a democratic government preemptively files the massive lawsuits against citizens with contract law lies in a quite self-interested “accountability-avoidance” mechanism. By doing so, bureaucrats could thus shift political accountability to which they have had to respond onto the judicial branch. To illustrate this argument, I draw on two case studies– the closed factories labor movement and anti-eviction movement– with up to 700 lawsuits totally in Taiwan from 1996 to 2015.

In both cases, state-initiated plaintiff-driven litigation shaped strategies available to social movement organizers greatly, ultimately giving rise to different outcomes: Closed factories labor movement failed; anti-eviction movement won. Utilizing archives and government documents, I show that to the bureaucrats, what does matter was not the costs and benefits of the process of litigation but how the process could enable them to evade accountability. In the anti-eviction movements, the government even viewed “filing the lawsuits against citizens” as the “Standard Operating Procedure” for executive departments to cope with similar controversies in national land and property issues. This study has broad implications for judicial politics and state-society relationship.

Keywords judicialization; democratic accountability; legal mobilization