Here is my research proposal for a visit to Umi. Thanks for your time.
1 Research Topic
A Study on the Administrative Litigation Judgement Documents of China Based on Text Mining Technique
2 Visiting Duration
August 15, 2017 to February 14, 2018
3 Research Background, Introduction and My Research Preparation
For a long time, governed by law has been an indicator of judging the development level of one society. In China, administrative litigation plays an important role in adjusting the relationship between state and society. Although the study on administrative litigation cases shows great value, it is under insufficient status for low judicial transparency. In recent years, accompanying the acceleration of government openness, a large number of administrative litigation judgment documents are published online. On November 13, 2013, judicial committee of the Supreme People's Court passed a document called "Provisions of the Supreme People's Court on the publication of judicial documents on the Internet by the people's courts", which demand all the judicial documents must be public online within seven days after the judgement. In this background, I got an access right to use a database collected by the Data Governance Center at the Tsinghua University. This data collection includes 400,000 administrative litigation judgment documents which is made from 2013 to 2015.
Last year, I got a scholarship provided by the Institute of Graduate at the Tsinghua University to support my research project. So far, I have successfully identified the judgement outcomes with supervised machine learning technique and made an elementary descriptive analysis on the administrative litigation in China. In the next task, I would try to analyze the influential factors affecting judgement outcomes and make a comparison between the administrative litigation of China and that of America. Dean Martin's expertise is in the study of judicial decision-making and he also works extensively in the field of political methodology and applied statistics, especially in the Bayesian inference method. I believe I could accomplish my research project under Professor Martin's supervision.
4 Specific Arrangements and Expected Goals
The next work is to analyze the judicial documents that I have collected. I intend to approach this work with mixed methodology, which involves quantitative methods such as cluster analysis and regression analysis, combining with some interview materials.
During my stay in University of Michigan, I hope that I could have some methodology courses to improve my further data processing ability, read the academic work related to my research that I could find in UM library, and discuss my research with my supervisor and other scholars there. These activities would be throughout the whole visiting time at the same time.
5 The Relationship between my Research and Ph. D training schedule
My current research project correlates to the writing work of my Ph. D dissertation closely. Considering the innovation of my research is both theoretical and methodological, and the quantitative methods of Political Science in University of Michigan are advanced, the visit to Department of Political Science would be helpful for me to finish my dissertation.
6 The Study plan after Returning China
After coming back from University of Michigan, I would engage in the thesis writing and further collect the materials that I might need for my research. I also expect this research could be a good start.