Norm Life Cycles and International Law: A Study of When International Legal Commitments Elicit Public Support for Compliance with R2P

The domestic compliance mechanism suggests that states abide by international human rights law because international law changes the public’s preferences, thus incentivizing elites to comply with human rights commitments. Yet, experimental findings regarding the extent to which international law affects public support for compliance are unclear. At times, legalization of norms seems to elicit substantial public support for compliance, but at other times, legalization seems to have little effect. This study incorporates the life cycle of international norms to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the conditions under which international legal commitments generate public support for compliance with human rights norms. I find that the effect of legalization depends on the internalization of the norm itself. When a norm is emerging, legalization garners greater public support. When the norm is internalized, legalization does not always generate greater public support. In a sense, state commitment and norm internalization have substitutable effects on eliciting public support for compliance. I also examine the causal mechanisms through which international law causes greater public support for compliance. Laws of high obligation elicit support by generating concerns over morality and by staking the state’s reputation, regardless of the norm’s life cycle. ‡I would like to thank Beth Simmons, Josh Kertzer, Muhammet Bas, Diana Mutz, Marc Meredith, Seth Soderberg, David Romney, Boram Lee, Anton Strezhnev, and participants of the Harvard International Relations Workshop and the Penn IR-IL Graduate Student Conference for offering helpful critique and advice. I am also grateful for the financial support of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. All errors are my own. Harvard IRB Protocol #IRB16-0345