How does backlash from consolidated democracies affect the behavior of liberal international institutions? We argue that liberal international institutions have incentives to appease their democratic critics. Liberal institutions rely on democratic support for their continued effectiveness and can accommodate democratic critics at a lower legitimacy cost than non-democratic challengers. We examine this theory in the context of the European Court of Human Rights using a new dataset of rulings until 2019 and a coding of government positions during multiple reform conferences. Combining matching and a difference-in-differences design, we find strong evidence that the Court exercises restraint towards consolidated democracies that have criticized the Court in multilateral reform conferences by rendering fewer violation judgments against these states. We find some evidence that governments have also recently appointed more deferential judges. The findings suggest that backlash can affect liberal international institutions even without membership exit.

No abstract

We challenge the prevalent claim that courts can only influence policy by adjudicating disputes. Instead, we theorize the shadow effect of courts: policy makers preemptively altering policies in anticipation of possible judicial review. While American studies imply that preemptive reforms hinge on litigious interest groups pressuring policy makers who support judicial review, we advance a comparative theory that flips these presumptions. In less litigious and more hostile political contexts, policy makers may instead weaponize preemptive reforms to preclude bureaucratic conflicts from triggering judicial oversight and starve courts of the cases they need to build their authority. By allowing some preemptive judicial influence to resist direct judicial interference, recalcitrant policy makers demonstrate that shadow effects are not an unqualified good for courts. We illustrate our theory by tracing how a major welfare reform in Norway was triggered by a conflict within its Ministry of Labor and a government resistance campaign targeting a little-known international court.

No abstract

When embarking on this project, I was warned that writing a PhD dissertation would be a lonely process. My experience has been different. Throughout this project, I have benefited from the guidance, encouragement, and support from a long list of people. I have also been fortunate to be part of two excellent research environments at the University of Oslo, the Department of Political Science and PluriCourts. I also benefitted immensely from spending the spring of 2017 as a visiting researcher at the Department of Government at Georgetown University. First and foremost, I would like to thank my two dissertation advisors, Jon Hovi and Daniel Naurin, who have guided me through this project. Jon has been truly exceptional in his willingness to always take the time to read and offer detailed comments on any draft presented to him. Not only has his comments helped increase the clarity of the arguments presented in this dissertation, but he also deserves much credit for increasing the quality of the prose. Daniel has offered excellent advice both for sharpening the theoretical contributions and for increasing the relevance of the project to a broader judicial politics audience. Daniel also helped expand the empirical scope of the project to include the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (in addition to the European Court of Human Rights). Erik Voeten has been extraordinarily generous in offering both advice and support. The collaboration with Erik was crucial for the collection of data concerning the European Court of Human Rights. Erik has also offered thoughtful comments on the articles that make up this dissertation and hosted me during my stay as a visiting researcher at Georgetown University. I have also learned a lot from having Erik as a co-author on a paper that I have worked on as a side-project to this dissertation. I would like thank the Norwegian Research Council for support received through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme (project number 223274). A significant part of the work that has gone into this dissertation has involved data collection, which would not have been possible without the hard work of a small army of research assistants. I would therefore like to thank Dongpeng Xia, Ella Adler, Olja Busbaher, and Gianinna Romero who helped collect data iii concerning the implementation of European Court of Human Rights judgments, and Live Standal Bøyum who helped create the database of Inter-American Court of Human Rights judgments. A number of friends and colleagues have also provided invaluable feedback on the different parts of this project. In particular, I would like to thank Taylor