(De-)Legitimation at the WTO Dispute Settlement Mechanism

While the legitimation of international organizations (IOs) has received increasing attention in recent years, a dominant part of the literature has been theoretical in nature. This is particularly true for studies on one specific type of IOs – international courts. The aim of this paper is to contribute to filling this gap, by empirically exploring the self-legitimation efforts of the WTO Dispute Settlement Mechanism (DSM) and the effects of such efforts on the perceptions of the DSM’s main constituents – WTO Members. The paper first identifies the means of self-legitimation employed by WTO dispute panels and the Appellate Body, and then analyzes the reaction to these efforts by various subsets of WTO Members by drawing on an original dataset of WTO Member statements issued within meetings of the WTO Dispute Settlement Body between 1995-2013. Employing supervised learning methods of text classification we first provide aggregate measures of Members’ expressed views on the DSM, before turning to an in-depth analysis of statements on reports that elicited widespread engagement across the membership. Statements in this context provide insights into the conditions for successful strategies of self-legitimation by the DSM among various subsets of Members. Yet they also reveal which DSM practices or strategies have served to (de-)legitimate panels and/or the Appellate Body among various subsets of Members over the years. To explain these differences we employ Structural Topic Models to estimate various ‘legitimacy’ topics within statements and identify significant relationships with Member-specific factors (such as DSM usage and regional affiliation). This both contributes to filling the scholarly gap that exists in the field, and provides panels and the Appellate Body with insights into the reception of various legitimating strategies by different groups of Members.