Administrative decentralization, legal fragmentation, and the rule of law in transitional economies: The enforcement of intellectual property rights laws in China, Russia, Taiwan, and the Czech Republic

This dissertation examines the impact of decentralization on the emergence of the rule of law in transitional economies. Through a paired comparison of two federal states (China and Russia) and two unitary states (Taiwan and the Czech Republic) the dissertation highlights the difficulties that federal states face in promoting the rule of law. The specific lens through which I approach the elusive question of the emergence of the rule of law is the enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPR) laws in the four countries under study.; The dissertation relies on a combination of intensive fieldwork and large N statistical analysis to identify three key facets of federalism that negatively impact the consistent and predictable enforcement of IPR laws: fiscal, administrative, and legal decentralization. Fiscal decentralization introduces perverse incentives for the localities to cater to local interests even if those diverge from the interests of the center. Administrative decentralization further limits the ability of the center to control the localities by fragmenting the vertical monitoring mechanisms within different bureaucracies. Finally, legal fragmentation (the presence of multiple and often contradictory sources of law at the national, provincial, and local level) creates ambiguity as to which law should be followed, and can easily be abused as a lucrative source of rents for corrupt officials. Cumulatively, those three types of decentralization present a major roadblock for the emergence of the rule of law and encourage the rise of corrupt bureaucratic behavior.; However, by analyzing differences in the enforcement of subtypes of IPR (copyrights, patents, and trademarks), my dissertation finds that the rule of law can emerge even in transitional federal states when either foreign pressure or domestic NGOs help to align the interests of the center and the localities in favor of enforcement.; This dissertation calls for a more nuanced view of the rule of law. Economic and political rule of law need not coexist in a country. In addition, the rule of law may be sectorally and geographically limited. Nonetheless, even non-democratic countries such as China can develop a system of the rule of law when certain conditions specified in the dissertation hold.