Abstract

Authoritarian regimes face a structural paradox: the very actors who can bolster the credibility and effectiveness of the legal system — lawyers — are also those most capable of challenging state authority. In democracies, legal mobilization is often celebrated as a driver of social change. Under autocracy, it is a potential liability. Yet autocrats across the world invest heavily in legal institutions, employ professional lawyers, and launch public legal education campaigns. Why? And how do they manage the political risks of empowering those trained to use law as an instrument of rights-claiming?

This dissertation argues that authoritarian regimes cultivate a professionalized rule-of-law arena in which legal activism is real but politically curated. Lawyers and other legal professionals, grounded in shared ethical norms and professional identity, can mobilize citizens to pursue legal remedies, even in contentious cases. However, the regime shapes, channels, and constrains that activism through selective responsiveness, offering substantive help in politically safe or state-serving disputes, while providing only symbolic or obstructive responses in politically risky ones.

The project develops this theory through three interlinked empirical chapters, each targeting a different stage in the pipeline from mobilization to engagement to outcome:

  1. Who Mobilizes the Law under Autocracy — a micro-level study of lawyer–citizen cooperation in contentious legal action, grounded in professional identity.
  2. Promoting Rule of Law in an Autocracy — a meso-level field experiment on civic-legal outreach, varying who delivers legal education and how citizens are incentivized to participate.
  3. Pro Bono as Political Control — a macro-level analysis of how legal bureaucracies deliver (or withhold) assistance through nationwide public legal aid hotlines.

Across these studies, I employ novel survey experiments, cluster-randomized controlled trials, and large-scale audit experiments. Together, the findings reveal that authoritarian legality is not a simple matter of repression versus permission; it is a dynamic process of professional-driven legal activism that is fostered, framed, and filtered by the state.

Professional Capital as a Driver of Mobilization

The starting point is the recognition that professional identity — the norms, ethics, and status associated with being a lawyer — is itself a form of political capital. Lawyers are trained to see themselves as duty-bound to uphold the law, to act in the best interest of their clients, and to maintain standards of quality and integrity. These norms can motivate them to take on challenging cases and to frame disputes in ways that elevate rights-based claims.

In my first chapter, Who Mobilizes the Law under Autocracy, I demonstrate that professional cues are more effective than moral or political appeals in fostering cooperation between lawyers and citizens in contentious legal action. In two preregistered survey experiments with over 2,700 participants (lawyers and citizens), professional framing significantly increased willingness to engage in risky legal mobilization, while moral and political appeals had weaker or inconsistent effects. Citizens, in turn, preferred lawyers who emphasized professional duty, perceiving them as more credible and trustworthy partners in legal disputes.

Implication: Professional capital is a latent mobilizing force in autocracies — one that the state must decide whether to suppress, ignore, or strategically deploy.

Framing, Incentives, and State Mediation

The second step is to understand how the state shapes the demand side of legal engagement. In Promoting Rule of Law in an Autocracy, I embed a field experiment in China’s Village Lawyer Program, a state-led initiative aimed at expanding legal knowledge and reducing rural disputes. Seventy villages were randomly assigned to receive legal education sessions with variation in (a) who invited them — a professional lawyer or their village chief — and (b) what incentive was offered — material rewards or social recognition.

The results reveal that the messenger and the incentive are not interchangeable. Chief-framed invitations and material incentives increased attendance, consistent with hierarchical authority and extrinsic motivation. But only lawyer-framed messages and social recognition increased actual use of legal services and knowledge of rights-based claims. Crucially, lawyer framing boosted trust in formal legal institutions, while chief framing reinforced trust in local political authorities.

Implication: Professional-led outreach can cultivate rule-of-law consciousness, but the regime can toggle between professional and political messengers to tilt outcomes toward compliance or rights-awareness.

Selective Responsiveness as Institutional Control

The final step examines what happens when citizens actually seek help. In Pro Bono as Political Control, I conduct nationwide audit experiments on more than 180 public legal aid hotlines. By varying the caller’s case type, background, and framing, I show that legal bureaucrats systematically discriminate against politically sensitive inquiries and non-local callers, while providing more substantive help to those who display legal knowledge or cite prior legal contact. Ethnic minorities and low-income individuals are more likely to receive symbolic gestures than substantive assistance. Interventions invoking professional or moral duty improve service quality more than appeals to legal norms or accountability — but political boundaries remain decisive.

Implication: Authoritarian legal institutions operationalize control not only by refusing service but also by substituting symbolic responsiveness for substantive help, thereby preserving legitimacy while managing risk.

The Causal Chain

Across the three chapters, the theory unfolds as a causal chain:

  1. Motivation (Micro-level): Professional identity motivates lawyers and citizens to cooperate in contentious legal mobilization.
  2. Mediation (Meso-level): The regime shapes engagement through strategic choice of messenger and incentive, steering demand toward politically safe channels.
  3. Delivery (Micro-to-Institutional): Bureaucracies filter claims through selective responsiveness, providing substantive help in safe domains and symbolic help in risky ones.

This integrated framework allows me to observe professional-driven legal activism from the moment of mobilization to the point of state response, revealing how law is both a resource and a risk for authoritarian rulers.

Methods and Data

The dissertation employs a multi-method design:

  • Survey experiments with lawyers and citizens to identify motivational drivers.
  • Cluster-randomized field trials to measure how framing and incentives shape real-world participation in legal programs.
  • Nationwide audit experiments to directly observe bureaucratic behavior and responsiveness.
  • Administrative and contextual data on bar governance, Party penetration, fiscal stress, and political campaigns to situate findings.

This design enables cross-validation of results across experimental settings, populations, and stages of the legal engagement process.

Contributions

  1. Theoretical: Reframes authoritarian legality as the curation of professional-driven activism rather than its wholesale suppression, moving beyond the binary of “repression vs. permission.”
  2. Empirical: Provides multi-level, multi-method evidence of how professional norms interact with political control, from individual motivations to institutional filtering.
  3. Methodological: Demonstrates the value of linking survey, field, and audit experiments to trace a mechanism across the entire mobilization–engagement–outcome pipeline.
  4. Practical: Offers insights into how the design of legal aid programs, civic education, and professional governance can alter citizen–state relations in autocracies.