Why Do States Comply With International Institutions? Insights From a Survey Experiment

A large literature in International Relations discusses the conditions of state compliance with international institutions. Despite the growing importance and influence of international organizations (IOs) in world politics, IOs seldom wield such powers as to force states into compliance with their decisions. Rather, they use more subtle institutional instruments and practices to incentivize states. In that regard, the relevant literature theorizes that IOs will be more likely to elicit compliance when they regularly produce and provide knowledge, monitor compliance, specify credible enforcement mechanisms, and ensure fairness in their decision-making procedures. With respect to information, it has been argued that the generation and exchange of reliable evidence about other states’ compliance as well as expert knowledge about the IOs’ substantive governance tasks produce unique benefits to states. In addition, it has long been argued that IOs can deter noncompliant behavior by codifying and implementing formal sanctioning mechanisms, which often range from naming and shaming practices to the imposition of financial and economic fines. Finally, a growing body of IO research proposes that the perceived legitimacy of IO procedures and practices is a central factor in eliciting compliance, even more so when the IO’s informational and enforcement functions are weak. However, less is known about the relative effects of knowledge, monitoring, enforcement, and legitimacy and how they might interact to produce more compliance or less compliance with IO rules and policies. This paper therefore investigates these questions in an experimental setting that offers the opportunity to avoid important inferential pitfalls. The design of IOs and hence their capacity to affect state incentives is not random but tied to a series of observable (e.g., issue area, cooperation problems) and unobservable factors that often risk to bias analyses of institutional effects. To overcome these important endogeneity concerns, we design and implement a survey experiment. We can thus examine the causal link between key institutional features of IOs, relating to knowledge production, enforcement, and legitimacy, and the extent to which they individually, or in combination, affect state compliance. The experiment is embedded in a survey asking 1000 IO staff members about their assessments and perceptions of the state and future of global governance. The survey was fielded in 2021. Respondents have been drawn from a sample of 30 international organizations from different substantive issue areas (security, trade, development, finance, migration, climate change) in world politics. Surveying IO staff is particularly relevant as these hold special knowledge and insights into the workings of their IOs and state behavior within these. The experimental question has four binary treatments related to an IO’s epistemic practices (1), compliance monitoring (2), sanctioning procedures (3), and the fairness of decision making (4). This yields in total 16 different combinations of institutional design features which are randomly assigned to participants. The dependent variable measures the extent to which IO officials believe that a certain combination of institutional features and practices elicits more compliance or less compliance.