Between law and politics: Explaining international dispute settlement behavior

Over recent decades a judicialization process of international dispute settlement procedures has taken place. Yet, the judicialization of procedures remains meaningless if the procedures are not used and accepted by disputing states in practice. Prominent theoretical approaches point to different conditions under which this is to be expected. Realism emphasizes the international distribution of power, institutionalism stresses the importance of the institutional design of international dispute settlement procedures, and liberalism points to the domestic institutional setting of the participating states. The article confronts these theoretical expectations with states’ actual dispute settlement behavior in the international trade regime, the United Nations Security Council, the European human rights regime and the regime on the protection of endangered species in the 1970s/80s and 1990s/2000s, respectively. Its main finding is that, compared to realism and liberalism, institutionalism fares better in explaining the judicialization of states’ dispute settlement behavior.