Questions: International Law and Compliance Mechanisms

Question 1

A small state ratified a trade treaty ten years ago. Economic conditions have changed and the treaty now costs it more than it gains in the short term. Realists would predict defection. What three mechanisms might explain why the state still complies?

Model answer: First, reputational concerns: defecting signals unreliability to all current and potential future treaty partners, raising the cost of future agreements and potentially triggering retaliatory non-compliance in other agreements. Second, domestic politics: the treaty may have been incorporated into domestic law, and domestic courts, export industries that benefit from partner-state market access, or civil society groups may actively constrain the executive from defecting. Third, legitimacy: if the state's decision-makers genuinely believe in the rightfulness of treaty obligations — perhaps because they participated in negotiating the treaty and regard it as a fair agreement — they may comply from a sense of legal obligation even when the immediate material calculus favors defection.

The point is that compliance is overdetermined in most cases — multiple mechanisms simultaneously support it. The realist prediction of defection when immediate interest favors it is too simple because it ignores the iterated game structure (reputational mechanism), the non-unitary nature of state decision-making (domestic politics mechanism), and the role of norms and legitimacy in shaping behavior beyond material incentives.

Question 2

Why do liberal democracies tend to have higher international law compliance rates than authoritarian states, according to the domestic politics model of compliance?

Model answer: In liberal democracies, international legal obligations are more likely to be formally incorporated into domestic law and enforced by independent courts. Legislatures can condition executive action on treaty compliance, and ratification typically involves legislative approval that creates political accountability. Civil society organizations, opposition parties, and domestic interest groups can mobilize around international legal norms to generate political pressure. These domestic entry points for international law mean that a democratic executive who defects from a treaty faces domestic political and legal consequences, not just international reputation costs. Authoritarian states have fewer institutional constraints on executive discretion: courts are less independent, legislatures are less powerful, and civil society is more restricted, making defection easier to execute without domestic political costs.

This draws on the 'liberal' model of IR compliance (associated with scholars like Harold Koh and Andrew Moravcsik) as a counterpart to purely systemic or reputational models. The key is identifying specific institutional channels through which international law enters domestic politics in democracies and explaining why those channels are weaker in authoritarian systems.