Annemieke van den Dool is a PhD Research Fellow at the Netherlands China Law Centre, where she focuses on legal change and public health crises in China. In her PhD dissertation “Never again: Legal change after public health crises in China,” she examines how and why laws change after public health crises and what the nature of such change is. The case studies included in this research project are the SARS pandemic, H7N9 avian influenza, an agri-environmental accident in Shanghai involving thousands of dead pigs, and the 2008 milk powder crisis.
To answer her research questions, Annemieke uses causal-process tracing, which means that she reconstructs the process from crisis to legal change as well as lawmaking processes. This is based on qualitative analysis of a wide range of written documents, including policy documents, laws and regulation, social media messages, news articles, legislative documents, and literature. Most of the data is in Chinese. Qualitative analysis is complemented with quantitative analysis of the degree of change using software that Annemieke co-developed specifically for this study.
This study contributes to existing theories of policy change and post-crisis politics, which are almost exclusively based on Western democracies as well as to our understanding of political stability in China, which is directly affected by crises. Moreover, the study sheds light on lawmaking processes in China, about which we know surprisingly little.
This project has been supported by a grant from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences for fieldwork in Beijing and a number of smaller grants for a semester at Harvard Law School and for attendance of various events in the fields of law, political science, and crisis studies.
During her PhD research, Annemieke spent 15 months in Beijing, hosted by the CUFE Law School, and 6 months at Harvard Law School, hosted by professor Alford at East Asian Legal Studies. Annemieke currently teaches in the political science department at Mid Sweden University in Östersund, Sweden.
Annemieke's PhD thesis supervisors are Prof. Benjamin van Rooij (promotor) and Dr. Jan Popma (daily supervisor).