Dealing with Clashes of International Law: A Microlevel Study of Climate and Trade

Abstract For years, scholars in international relations have addressed questions related to regime complexity and its effects. However, there is a lack of understanding of how individuals react to clashes of international law obligations when assessing domestic policies. In this article, we study the extent to which citizens are concerned with compliance and noncompliance with international law when their governments design domestic laws to implement international obligations. We are, in particular, interested in whether citizens’ reactions to clashes of international obligations are driven by concerns about being exposed internationally for breaching international law or concerns about tangible material costs. Our empirical analysis is based on an experiment embedded in a survey of Swiss citizens’ attitudes toward environmental issues. The experiment first shows that individuals react to both information about compliance as well as noncompliance, whereas the shifts are more notable in the case of negative information about noncompliance. Second, we find that information about the country being subject to international adjudication (what we call exposure costs) in case of noncompliance is more consequential than information about material costs (facing retaliation).