Does the public care if their leaders fail to uphold or comply with their country’s standing international commitments? If so, under what conditions? I study this question in the context of attitudes toward institutionalized trade cooperation. Using survey experiments, I find that the public has a pronounced taste for compliance that is largely independent of the underlying political and economic context. The public is less willing to endorse the imposition of trade restrictions when doing so would violate standing trade agreements. This is the case even in contexts where the public would otherwise support protectionist policy: when the unemployment rate is high, when there are a large number of jobs at stake, and when the trade partner has recently failed to honor their own trade commitments. I find little in the way of copartisanship dynamics, but document strong dispositional effects in which those not predisposed to view international cooperation in a positive light impose systematically smaller punishments on leaders who violate treaty commitments.

如果他们的领导人未能维护或遵守其国家的长期国际承诺，公众会关心吗？如果可以，在什么条件下？我在对制度化贸易合作的态度的背景下研究这个问题。通过调查实验，我发现公众对合规有着明显的偏好，这在很大程度上独立于潜在的政治和经济背景。公众不太愿意支持实施贸易限制，因为这样做会违反现行贸易协定。即使在公众支持保护主义政策的情况下也是如此：当失业率很高、大量就业机会受到威胁、以及贸易伙伴最近未能履行自己的贸易承诺时。我几乎没有发现党派合作的动力，但记录了强烈的倾向效应，即那些不倾向于以积极的眼光看待国际合作的人对违反条约承诺的领导人施加系统性的较小的惩罚。