Domestic Political Coalitions and IL Compliance

Joel Trachtman, whose book with my colleague Jeff Dunoff on Ruling the World is just out, also has a new paper on the relationship of domestic political coalitions and compliance with international law.  Of course, compliance theory has taken a strong hold in international law (and international relations) scholarship of late.  For the most part, however, that work has had a constructivist foundation (and here I’m thinking of the Chayes’ New Sovereignty book along with work by Harold Koh as well as Derek Jinks and Ryan Goodman).  Trachtman, in contrast, takes on compliance within a rationalist framework.  Unlike recent rationalist work that focuses on unpacking reputation and asking if it’s the driver for state compliance with international law, however, Trachtman’s focus is different; he’s assessing compliance via domestic political decision-making.  Here’s the abstract:

The cause of compliance with international law is a domestic political decision to engage in the behavior that constitutes compliance. This article explains the importance of the interdependence between domestic politics and foreign politics in determining compliance. International legal commitments allow the formation of coalitions between those who will benefit by their own state’s compliance with the international legal rule in question, and those who will benefit from other states’ compliance with the international legal rule. This theory is based on established approaches to international relations in the political science literature, in particular two-level game theory associated with Robert Putnam and the “second image reversed” approach associated with Peter Gourevitch. The two extensions of this approach made in this article, (i) from international relations more broadly to international law, and (ii) from adherence to compliance, raise some questions, and bear some important fruit. These extensions help to illuminate the problem of compliance. The theory proposed here subsumes other theories of compliance and provides a highly plausible set of assumptions about the circumstances under which we may expect states to comply with international law.