Research

Overall Interests

I am interested in the way ideas about management and oversight shape the institutions and practices of governance. In particular, I’m interested in how and why states build different institutions to manage bureaucrats, and how the differences in those institutions affect governance outcomes.

Book Project

My book project, ‘Building a Supervision Science: Bureaucratic Control from Mao to Xi,’ analyzes the causes and consequences of shifts to different modes of bureaucratic control in China from 1949 to the present by following the careers and management models advocated by different groups of ‘supervision scientists.’ These officials, consultants, and academics all introduced, advocated for, and modified models of how the bureaucracy should work, and their ideas shaped the practice of bureaucratic management in important ways.

By using a variety of archival materials, I am able to open up the black box of management, oversight, and accountability institutions to examine the politics of their operation directly. In doing so, I revise our understanding of how the party-state’s internal checks and balances have responded to different priorities over time.

Publications:

Michael Thompson-Brusstar (2022) “Supreme Supervisors? Building the People’s Procuracy, 1949-1961,” China Law and Society Review 6:1, 1-35.

This article interrogates the main events in procuratorial development from 1949 to 1961. Its aim is to better understand the procuracy during the Maoist era by reframing debates about its development along a spectrum: from primarily internal debates that challenged the development of the institution to external debates that challenged the role of the institution. These two dimensions also clarify how the procuracy reflected the politics of the time, especially issues of state construction and building legal knowledge, both within the state and among the “people.” The article shows that “internal” debates stemmed from the largely elite-centered and technocratic concerns of internal organization; “external” debates connected, instead, to broader concerns about the socialist legal project and the procuracy’s place in it. Reframing the institution’s history in this way enables us to understand the concepts and issues shaping the procuracy that crossed “period” boundaries and how responses to those challenges changed over time. Internal limitations (due to lack of resources) and external challenges (to develop flexible methods for accomplishing institutional goals while appearing to serve national objectives) are entwined, making the procuracy from 1949 to 1961 a site of tension between law and policy as well as a locus of contestation about the role of law in Maoist China.

Iza Ding & Michael Thompson-Brusstar (2021). “The Anti-Bureaucratic Ghost in China’s Bureaucratic Machine.” The China Quarterly, 248(S1), 116-140.

The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) ideology, rooted in its foundational struggles, explicitly denounces “bureaucratism” (guanliaozhuyi) as an intrinsic ailment of bureaucracy. Yet while the revolutionary Party has blasted bureaucratism, its revolutionary regime has had to find a way to coexist with bureaucracy, which is a requisite for effective governance. An anti-bureaucratic ghost thus dwells in the machinery of China’s bureaucratic state. We analyse the CCP’s anti-bureaucratism through two steps. First, we perform a historical analysis of the Party’s anti-bureaucratic ideology, teasing out its substance and emphasizing its roots in and departures from European Marxism and Leninism. Second, we trace both the continuity and evolution in the Party’s anti-bureaucratic rhetoric, taking an interactive approach that combines close reading with computational analysis of the entire corpus of the People’s Daily (1947–2020). We find striking endurance as well as subtle shifts in the substance of the CCP’s anti-bureaucratic ideology. We show that bureaucratism is an umbrella term that expresses the revolutionary Party’s anxiety about losing its popular legitimacy. Yet the substance of the Party’s concern evolved from commandism and revisionism under Mao, to corruption and formalism during reform. The Party’s ongoing critiques of bureaucratism and formalism unfold in parallel fashion with its efforts to standardize, regularize and institutionalize the state.

Margaret Hanson & Michael Thompson-Brusstar (2021) “Building Socialist Legality: Political Order and Institutional Development in the Soviet and Chinese Procuracies,” Europe-Asia Studies, 73:1, 157-177.

Why do some attempts to use legal institutions to exert central state control fail, while others succeed? Through a controlled comparison of the Soviet Union (USSR) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), we analyse the institutionalization of the procuracy, an agency charged with enforcing central legal directives. We show that institutional design, competition, and political support during critical junctures created a positive feedback for the institutionalization of the procuracy in the USSR but left it weak in China. These findings contribute to our understanding of institutional development, state-building, and authoritarian legal control.

Ongoing Projects:

Authoritarian leaders face information constraints in evaluating their subordinates, and monitoring institutions are vulnerable to capture. How, then, can autocrats hold their bureaucrats accountable when popular oversight is limited? General approaches to monitoring focus on two ideal types: ‘internal’ auditing where supervisors are co-located with the supervised, and ‘external’ monitoring where supervisors are deliberately insulated from the supervised. This paper examines the effect of an increase in ‘external’ monitoring: the dispatch of Chinese Central Inspection Teams during Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design on data from 2012-2015, I find that inspections by central inspection teams increase the number of corruption investigations, including of provincial leaders, but that the effect decreases over time, when localities have more time to prepare. This finding has important implications for under- standing the responses of political elites to even high-profile institutional change in authoritarian regimes.

Advances in optical character recognition (OCR) and related technologies—a suite of computational tools for digitizing raw document scans—have increased researchers’ ability to construct large corpora from undigitized source material. These technologies can dramatically expand the temporal and topical breadth of text analysis in the social sciences. This paper takes three steps towards providing best practices for applying these technologies. First, it outlines a procedure for choosing an optimal digitization pipeline using hyper-parameter search aided by transfer learning and simple language models. This consists of exploring choices in OCR model, as well as pre- and post-processing decisions. Second, it examines the efficacy of our proposed procedure for selecting a pipeline using simulations of downstream text analysis tasks (text classification, topic modeling, and dictionary methods). Third, it examines the validity and efficacy of OCR outputs from large language models (LLMs), comparing and combining them with outputs of traditional OCR surrogate models to ensure validity. Finally, it consolidates best practices for researchers digitizing new source material. We demonstrate our approach with a dataset of Papal political and policy documents from the 6th to 18th centuries.

In this multiple-paper project, we investigate role of delegations and study times originating in China’s ministries in the dramatic economic and political changes of China’s reform era. In the first paper of this project, we studied how the Chinese government leveraged information from foreign political and economic systems after 1978. Through analysis of original text from study trips from 1978 to 2010, we computationally trace the flow of ideas and text between study reports to leadership speeches, the press, and policy documents. These conclusions shed new light on the role of policy learning and bureaucratic entrepreneurship in the politics of reform and institutional change.

When are developing countries able to reform their administrative states, and when do such reforms fail? When reform coalitions fragment or fracture, how do administrative reforms proceed? This paper uses the fragmentation of the reform coalition during China’s nascent administrative reforms in the 1980s as a case study to shed light on these important questions, focusing on the development of the civil service system. Using a new panel dataset of personnel management and reform publications from 1986 to 1993, the paper examines how regime insiders and outsiders differentially altered their proposals and discussions of personnel reform before and after elite realignment in the late 1980s. The results connect the politics of elite realignment with the available of a technocratic, depoliticized consensus in public administration for the eventual passage of the Interim Regulations on Civil Servants in 1993.

Other writing: