Populist Opposition to International Courts: Sovereignty or Liberalism?

• In Event: Populist Challenges to International Organizations

Abstract

Why do populists tend to oppose international courts? First, populists may object to the sovereignty costs associated with delegating authority to international courts. Second, populists may object to the liberal mandate of the courts. These two arguments are often conflated, but they have distinct implications. The first suggests that populists will be fine with domestic courts interpreting human rights, but not when international courts do so. The second suggests that populists may object to domestic courts for the very same reasons that they dislike international courts: they are undemocratic, non-majoritarian vehicles for liberal elites to secure their rights and those of undeserving groups. We seek to disentangle these two motivations in a series of survey experiments on support for the European Court of Human Rights in Denmark, the United Kingdom, Poland, and Spain.

Authors

• Erik Voeten, Georgetown University

• Juan Antonio Mayoral, University of Copenhagen

• Anton Strezhnev, University of Pennsylvania

• Mikael Rask Madsen, Uni. of CPH