Judicialization and Public Support for Compliance with International Commitments

What effect does judicializing international commitments have on incentives to comply with international law? We study this question using experiments embedded in a survey of the American public. We find that non-compliance signals from an international court work precisely as theories of non-compliance anticipate, raising perceptions of legal obligation and support for returning to compliance relative to non-compliance signals from foreign state parties (i.e., the “victims” in a given dispute). At the same time, we find that signals from courts are no more (and no less) effective in generating public support for returning to compliance than identical non-compliance signals sent by international organizations or domestic political elites. These results suggest that courts are not uniquely positioned to shape the politics of compliance and that the often-rancorous debates over institutional design may be just as much about conflicts over institutional control as they are about conflicts over institutional forms or labels.