Most of the projects below use preregistered survey experiments in Taiwan, paired with case study and archival work.
Working Papers
Selective Deference Under Threat: Public Threat Perceptions and Democratic Oversight in Taiwan
Preregistered 2×2 survey experiment, Taiwan, N = 2,734
Presented as an iPoster at APSA 2026; second wave in the field
Abstract · Project page · Preregistration · draft available on request
When citizens face credible external security threats, do they simply trade away democratic accountability? This paper argues the answer is dimensional rather than categorical. Citizens distinguish between two separable objects of democratic information governance: public disclosure (what the general public and media can access) and authorized oversight (what legally empowered institutions can monitor). Under threat, these two dimensions need not move together.Using a preregistered 2×2 survey experiment in Taiwan, I vary threat salience and the government’s informational posture. The results reveal a clear asymmetry: both high threat and secrecy-expanding policy responses substantially increase acceptance of limiting public disclosure, but support for authorized oversight remains resistant to erosion. Under high threat, the negative effect of a secrecy-expanding policy on oversight support disappears entirely. This is consistent with a compensatory demand for authorized oversight as public disclosure becomes more restricted. Security pressure produces selective rather than generalized deference.
Works in Progress
When Governments Recruit Courts: Judicializing Contested Policy in Democratic States
When governments want to carry out a contested policy, why do they sometimes sue their own citizens rather than act through administrative authority? Research on judicialization usually begins after conflict has reached the judiciary. This paper looks instead at the governments that put it there, and finds that routing the same coercive policy through civil litigation raises its perceived legitimacy even before the court has ruled.
Paired case studies and a preregistered survey experiment. Draft in progress; presented at an empirical legal research workshop, Academia Sinica, August 2026.
Abstract
When governments seek to implement contested policies, why do they sometimes turn to courts rather than act through administrative authority or other available means? Research on judicialization usually begins after political conflict has reached the judiciary, focusing on how courts constrain governments, how citizens mobilize law, or how political actors transfer major policy questions to constitutional courts. This article instead examines governments as initiators of ordinary adjudication.I argue that state-initiated litigation is consequential because governments can place policy conflicts before institutionally separate courts while retaining substantial control over case initiation, the initial legal claims, and the remedies sought. I trace two episodes of mass government litigation in Taiwan, the Factory Closure Workers’ Case and the Huaguang Community Case, to show how longstanding policy objectives, accountability pressures, and available legal instruments shaped decisions to pursue citizens through ordinary civil courts. The cases also show how litigation translated collective policy conflicts into individualized claims over debt, possession, and monetary liability, while opening a judicial arena that governments could initiate but not fully control.
A preregistered survey experiment identifies an important political consequence of this institutional choice. Routing the same coercive policy through civil litigation rather than administrative action substantially increases its perceived legitimacy, even before the court has ruled. Yet strategic government justification for choosing litigation produces no corresponding decline in trust in judicial independence and does not lead citizens to conclude that the court has favored the government. The findings suggest that ordinary adjudication can enhance the legitimacy of contested state action even without prior judicial endorsement, expanding our understanding of judicialization from what courts decide to how governments place conflicts before them.
Authoritarian Symbols, Priority Competition, and the Persistence of Non-Removal in Taiwan
Transitional justice scholarship treats symbolic measures as the cheapest item on the agenda and the least likely to meet resistance. Taiwanese survey data show the opposite: removing authoritarian symbols is the only transitional justice option that citizens rank below doing nothing, even though the same respondents put opening the archives first. The paper argues that this is a question of priority rather than opposition, and shows how the renaming procedure then locks the low ranking into place.
Analysis complete; drafting. Evidence from a quadratic voting survey and a conjoint experiment.
Welfare Fairness, Free-Riding Concerns, and the Boundaries of Democratic Solidarity
Taiwan’s National Health Insurance is compulsory and nearly universal, yet its occupationally differentiated premiums produce visible disputes over who pays fairly. Standard political economy accounts expect perceived inequity to weaken support for risk sharing. The paper finds the opposite: worrying that others free-ride goes with stronger support for the shared pool, not weaker, and the factor that does track weaker solidarity is uncertainty about one’s own premium.
Draft complete; a second preregistered wave tests the mechanism.
Thesis
The State Against Citizens: Blame-shifting Litigation and the Judicialization of Politics in Taiwan
Master’s Thesis, National Taiwan University
Earlier versions presented at APSA 2017 and LSA 2017
2017 Best Dissertation Award, Taiwan Political Science Association (TPSA)
Leichen Fellowship for Excellence Dissertation (2017)
Chiho Fellowship for Excellence Dissertation Proposal (2015)
Abstract · Library Link
A large body of literature on judicialization and legal mobilization has demonstrated that courts have played an increasing role in social change and policymaking over the past decades. Little attention has been paid to the judicialization of policy issues, especially to how the state interacts with society through judicial tactics. Departing from the literature of legal mobilization, which is mainly society-centered, I propose a novel state-centered story: administrative agencies in Taiwan tend to use litigation to control and curb the momentum of social movements. I argue that the rationale for why a democratic government preemptively files massive lawsuits against citizens with contract law lies in a self-interested “accountability-avoidance” mechanism. By doing so, bureaucrats shift political accountability, which they would otherwise have to bear, onto the judicial branch.To illustrate this argument, I draw on two case studies: the closed factories labor movement and the anti-eviction movement, which together involved nearly 700 lawsuits in Taiwan from 1996 to 2015. In both cases, state-initiated, plaintiff-driven litigation greatly shaped the strategies available to social movement organizers, ultimately producing different outcomes: the closed factories labor movement failed, while the anti-eviction movement succeeded. Utilizing archives and government documents, I show that for bureaucrats, what mattered was not the costs and benefits of litigation per se, but how the process enabled them to evade accountability. In the anti-eviction movement, the government even viewed “filing lawsuits against citizens” as the “Standard Operating Procedure” for executive departments to manage land and property controversies. This study has broad implications for judicial politics and state–society relations.