A WTO Ruling Matters: Citizens’ Support for the Government’s Compliance with Trade Agreements

Naoko Matsumura

doi:10.1515/peps-2018-0013

Abstract

An international court’s ruling is expected to influence public opinion because of the perception of its legality and the subsequent costs of noncompliance. However, there has been little direct empirical evidence to support this claim. To close this lacuna, I conducted a survey experiment to examine the power of a court’s ruling in the context of a trade dispute. The experiment shows that citizens become less supportive of their government’s noncompliance with GATT/WTO agreements when the World Trade Organization issues an adverse ruling, compared to when their government is verbally accused of a violation of the same agreements by a foreign country. However, the experiment also finds that the impact of a ruling is conditional upon the level of compliance of the winner of the dispute.

Keywords: compliance; international court; public opinion; survey experiment; WTO

Funding source: JSPS KAKENHI

Award Identifier / Grant number: 16H06800 and 18K12722

Funding statement: This research was supported by the JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number: 16H06800 and 18K12722.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Ryan Brutger, Jessica Edry, Tobias Heinrich, Brett Ashely Leeds, Atsushi Tago, and Michael Tomz, for their comments and suggestions for earlier versions of this paper. Upon publication, all survey materials and replication data for analysis mentioned in the text and footnotes will be available from the author. This study has been screened and approved by the institutional review board of the Faculty and Graduate School of Law, Kobe University.

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Baltimore, Maryland, February 22–25, 2017, the Pacific International Politics Conference, Seoul, South Korea, July 1–2, 2017, and the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, California, August 31–September 3, 2017.

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The online version of this article offers supplementary material (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/peps-2018-0013).

Published Online: 2019-02-14

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