The literature on compliance with international court (IC) decisions has increasingly centered on domestic politics. Such accounts draw attention on the incentives for using compliance to lock-in domestic democracy; the role of alliances between ICs and domestic compliance-partners that facilitate compliance as well as on the socialization processes that lead domestic elites to accept IC judgments as the law of the land. The role of legitimacy challenges, politicization of judgments and domestic political salience have been invoked in explanations of specific cases. This paper will attempt to study the relationship between legitimacy challenges, politicization and domestic salience and compliance more systematically, both theoretically and based on empirical evidence from the European Court of Human Rights.
