Fields of Interest:

authoritarian politics, the political economy of legal and state institutions, information politics, and the political consequences of artificial intelligence, with a regional focus on China

Ziwen Zu studies authoritarian politics, the political economy of legal and state institutions, information politics, and the political consequences of artificial intelligence, with a regional focus on China. His research asks how authoritarian regimes build, manage, and adapt the institutions that govern everyday life, and how ordinary citizens, elites, and bureaucrats interact with those institutions in practice. A central theme is how regimes expand citizens’ access to courts, legal services, and the state without allowing law to become an independent political constraint, and how frontline professionals and intermediaries shape what legality means on the ground.

His current research agenda spans three areas. First, the political economy of legal and political institutions, including how courts, the legal profession, bureaucracies, and the backgrounds of political elites shape governance, policy, and state-society relations. Second, information politics, examining participatory digital surveillance, censorship, propaganda, and the formation of public opinion under authoritarian rule. Third, the political effects of artificial intelligence, including how AI may mitigate or reproduce bias in legal and judicial decision-making. Methodologically, his work combines field and survey experiments, causal inference, computational text analysis, archival research, and original data collection.

Back to main faculty page