(iPoster) When Governments Recruit Courts: Legal Mobilization, Compliance, and Judicial Legitimacy

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Legislative Studies & Authoritarian Demands, Compliance, and the Politics of Protest
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Authoritarian Demands, Compliance, and the Politics of Protest

Abstract

Governments need not repress citizens openly to compel compliance with a contested demand. They can instead move it into the courts, recasting a political choice as a legal obligation. Why channel coercion through ordinary courts rather than administrative authority, and what does this do to public views of the judiciary? This paper studies an early institutional choice: when governments themselves generate the cases through which courts enter policy conflicts. I pair two archival studies of mass state-initiated civil litigation in Taiwan with a preregistered 2×2 survey experiment (N = 2,718). The experiment holds a coercive action fixed and varies whether it proceeds by administrative order or civil suit, and whether officials justify it in principled or openly strategic terms. Citizens detect the instrumental use: a strategic rationale raises the perception that the court is a government resource (JS − JP = +0.15, p = .006; adjusted +0.19, p < .001). Yet the inference stops at the institutional boundary — no differential erosion of trust in judicial independence, and an equivalence test rules out inferring court collusion. The legitimacy cost falls on the government's action, not the court: legal mobilization makes courts' political use visible without making them bear its cost.

Author

• Yuru Fu, National Taiwan University