For years, scholars in international relations have addressed questions related to regime complexity and its effects. However, there is a lack of understanding of how individuals react to clashes of international law obligations when assessing domestic policies. In this article, we study the extent to which citizens are concerned with compliance and noncompliance with international law when their governments design domestic laws to implement international obligations. We are, in particular, interested in whether citizens’ reactions to clashes of international obligations are driven by concerns about being exposed internationally for breaching international law or concerns about tangible material costs. Our empirical analysis is based on an experiment embedded in a survey of Swiss citizens’ attitudes toward environmental issues. The experiment first shows that individuals react to both information about compliance as well as noncompliance, whereas the shifts are more notable in the case of negative information about noncompliance. Second, we find that information about the country being subject to international adjudication (what we call exposure costs) in case of noncompliance is more consequential than information about material costs (facing retaliation).

中文翻译：

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处理国际法冲突：气候与贸易的微观研究


多年来，国际关系学者一直在研究与政权复杂性及其影响相关的问题。然而，在评估国内政策时，人们缺乏对个人对国际法义务冲突的反应的理解。在本文中，我们研究了当政府制定国内法来履行国际义务时，公民对遵守和不遵守国际法的关注程度。我们特别感兴趣的是，公民对国际义务冲突的反应是出于对因违反国际法而面临国际风险的担忧，还是出于对有形物质成本的担忧。我们的实证分析基于一项瑞士公民对环境问题的态度调查中嵌入的实验。实验首先表明，个人对有关合规性和不合规性的信息都有反应，而在有关不合规的负面信息的情况下，这种变化更为明显。其次，我们发现，在违规情况下，有关国家/地区受到国际裁决的信息（我们称之为风险敞口成本）比有关材料成本（面临报复）的信息更重要。