(For Whom) Is Context Pretext? Domestic Audience Reactions to Non-Compliance

• In Event: Compliance and Defiance with International Commitments

Abstract

Does the public care if their leaders fail to comply with their country's standing international commitments? If so, under what conditions? I study this question in the context of attitudes toward institutionalized trade cooperation. Using survey experiments, I find that the public has a pronounced taste for compliance that is largely independent of situational context. On average, the public is much less willing to endorse the imposition of trade restrictions when doing so would violate standing trade agreements and this is the case even in contexts in which they would otherwise be expected to support protectionist policy: when the unemployment rate is high, when there are a large number of jobs at stake, when the leader is a co-partisan, and when the trade partner in question has a history of violating the agreement themselves. Importantly, however, I find strong dispositional effects with isolationists and militarists imposing lower costs on leaders who fail to honor the state's cooperative commitments than their more internationalist and pacific compatriots. These results compliment other recent findings on the domestic politics of reputation costs and suggest that non-compliance could be used strategically by incumbent leaders to signal their commitment to key, but skeptical, domestic political constituencies.

Author

• Ryan M. Powers, University of Georgia