The power and the limits of international law under authoritarianism: Evidence from a survey experiment

A growing literature demonstrates how authoritarian leaders use or repurpose democratic institutions to enhance regime survival. Law, and especially international law, is one of such instruments: autocrats embed their policies in the language of the law to justify or legitimize domestic policies in various spheres. Yet, we know very little about the actual effect such framing has on public support of these policies, especially outside of liberal democracies. This study seeks to advance our understanding of the conditions under which the public approves or disapproves domestic policies by conducting a series of survey experiments. My main interest is in the effect of competing legal hierarchy (national vs. international) on approval of domestic policies across various policies in non-democratic regimes. When a country violates international norms and/or places domestic law above international norms, which side would the public choose? To which extent does embedding a policy in international legal language influence public support (a) for these policies, and (b) domestic and international institutions involved in decision-making? I will focus on public support depending on case outcomes (whether respondents view them as favourable or not) or levels of authority involved in the decision-making (no judiciary, constitutional court, international court) across several vignettes (i.e. human rights, asylum, business law). This paper is a pre-registration plan of a planned survey experiment to test this argument. Originally planned to be fielded in Russia, I am now expanding the scope of this study to two other jurisdictions: Turkey, a competitive authoritarian regime with complex relations with the European human rights institutions, and Poland, which in addition to democratic backsliding also has the law that places domestic law above international norms.