The Mechanisms of Government Compliance with International Law: Evidence from the Anti-Corruption Regime

In the past few decades new laws and regulations to curb transnational crime have proliferated: issues such as corruption, money laundering, and illicit trafficking of weapons, drugs, and persons have been at the forefront of this global agenda. But how effective are international regulations in curbing these new forms of criminal activity? Scholars have argued that the effectiveness of such norms rests on two factors. First, the ability and willingness of international players to sanction bad behaviour and reward obedience, often called the cost-benefit approach to compliance. Second, the socialisation of actors into voluntary compliance, usually termed the logic of appropriateness approach. Yet, scholars have not yet been able to effectively measure the relative importance of each causal mechanism of compliance. In this presentation we will showcase the first results of a survey experiment conducted in Brazil in 2020 to explore the relative importance of these two key mechanisms in the workings of international anti-corruption norms. By randomizing exposition to informational cues to a representative sample of Brazilian voters and employing a mediation analysis model, we are able to calculate the relative importance of each mechanism in changing individuals’ perception of the importance of fighting corruption. This paper also contributes to ongoing debates about strategies to overcome traditional problems of conceptualization and measurement in the study of corruption. By combining a randomized control trial and a statistical model designed to indirectly capture the causal effects of exposition to information cues, we are able to assess how individuals react to the existence of a corruption scandal without having to directly measure the phenomenon. We anticipate that this strategy could be useful to examine other questions related to public opinion behavior when confronted with information about corruption.