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

Matsumura Naoko ()
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Matsumura Naoko: Graduate School of Law, Kobe University, Kobe, Japan

Peace Economics, Peace Science, and Public Policy, 2019, vol. 25, issue 2, 12

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 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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DOI: 10.1515/peps-2018-0013

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