Judicialization and Public Support for Compliance with International Commitments.

This article examines whether judicializing international commitments—specifically through international courts (ICs)—affects domestic public perceptions of legal obligation and support for compliance with international law. Using survey experiments with a representative sample of the American public, the study compares reactions to non-compliance signals from ICs, international organizations (IOs), domestic political elites (DPE), domestic courts, and foreign states across two treaty contexts: the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (VCCR) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). The findings indicate that while IC rulings can raise awareness of violations and mobilize support for compliance, they are no more effective than signals from IOs or bipartisan domestic political leaders, and less influential than domestic courts. Moreover, the public's response varies with the perceived trustworthiness of the signal sender, showing skepticism toward non-compliance claims from adversarial foreign states but greater acceptance when such claims come from neutral third parties. These results suggest that the institutional form of dispute settlement bodies matters less to domestic audiences than their perceived neutrality and expertise, challenging assumptions that ICs uniquely constrain state behavior through public opinion.