Is the good news about compliance good news about cooperation?

Abstract

Recent research on compliance in international regulatory regimes has argued (1) that compliance is generally quite good; (2) that this high level of compliance has been achieved with little attention to enforcement; (3) that those compliance problems that do exist are best addressed as management rather than enforcement problems; and (4) that the management rather than the enforcement approach holds the key to the evolution of future regulatory cooperation in the international system. While the descriptive findings above are largely correct, the policy inferences are dangerously contaminated by endogeneity and selection problems. A high rate of compliance is often the result of states formulating treaties that require them to do little more than they would do in the absence of a treaty. In those cases where noncompliance does occur and where the effects of selection are attenuated, both self-interest and enforcement play significant roles.

Treaty Compliance and Violation

“…Long standing theoretical traditions continue to inform research, and to some extent realism inspires the null hypothesis of choice. But today's realists are more likely to stress international law's epiphenomenalism rather than its utterly irrelevance to international politics (Downs et al 1996;Goldsmith & Posner 2005). Moreover, some realists at least acknowledge the possibility that international law might influence state behavior -even in wartime -by theorizing and testing for its possible influence in their research (Valentino et al 2006).…”

Re-thinking FATF: an experimentalist interpretation of the Financial Action Task Force

“…Penalty defaults are Bdestabilization mechanisms that induce reluctant parties to cooperate in framework rule-making and respect its outcomes, while stimulating them to propose plausible and superior alternatives, typically by threatening to reduce their control over their own fates^(Zeitlin, 2015, p. 5). Material sanctions that fail to secure the targeted actor's deeper engagement in the governance process will be less effective, eliciting Bshallow compliance^at best [29]. By this logic, material sanctions should become less necessary over time as actors become embedded within the experimentalist process, even with rising standards.…”

“…12 This phase, however, still focused predominantly on whether states 10 As of June 2017, seven countries were on the list: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ethiopia, Iraq, Syrian, Uganda, Vanuatu, and Yemen. 11 [29]. 12 It is interesting to note that few IOs, if any, have been able to rely on this kind of monitoring mechanism.…”

Support for international trade law: The US and the EU compared

“…A long-running debate in the international relations (IR) literature suggests that we can only capture the true level of commitment if we can empirically show how compliance with international law restricts domestic behavior or leads to change in domestic policies (a constraining effect). 22 Put differently, if ratification of international agreements resembles cheap talk (as implementation costs are close to zero), then consent is not a valid proxy for the overall commitment or support. In other words, the focus on leadership by studying how active the US and EU have been in pushing for international law needs to be complemented by studying their actual commitments.…”