Dilemmas of Delegation: The Politics of Authority in International Courts

One of the most enduring questions for the study of politics relates to what, if any, independent power international institutions have to affect the behavior of sovereign states. This dissertation addresses this question by examining the politics underlying one supranational judicial body’s exercise of authority—the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Dispute Settlement Mechanism (DSM). International courts are strategic legal actors that operate in a highly political context. Politics matter for judicial outcomes—the rulings of courts—but legal constraints moderate the impact of politics in fairly systematic ways. The dissertation specifies the conditions under which one dynamic prevails and demonstrates that power politics do not dominate international judicial interactions. Rather, courts are sensitive to the degree of institutional support they enjoy among the collective membership and a broader set of relevant stakeholders. Collective support for or challenges to a court’s institutional legitimacy—what I call a court’s political capital—affect judicial outcomes more than the preferences of dominant stakeholders. The second chapter develops the dissertation’s theoretical argument, while Chapter 3 describes the political context within which the WTO’s judicial bodies operate. It applies methods of automated text analysis to an original dataset of all member statements made within the WTO Dispute Settlement Body from 1995-2013 in order to construct measures of the DSM’s political capital. Chapter 4 employs original measures of dispute outcomes to identify how WTO panels respond to shifts in the DSM’s political capital. It finds that dispute panels are politically savvy, as they tend to signal less deference to national regulatory choices only when the DSM enjoys relatively greater support among the membership as a whole. However, the legal constraints of appellate case law moderate the influence of these political pressures on dispute outcomes. Chapter 5 identifies when the Appellate Body reverses panel findings, with a focus on when it takes into account views expressed by governments. Chapter 6 turns to the impact of the WTO’s judicial authority on state behavior, specifically compliance with its judgments. It employs original measures of dispute judgments and compliance outcomes to demonstrate that the WTO’s judicial bodies use the content of their rulings to ease the domestic political costs of trade policy changes, thereby acting as ‘partners in compliance’ with a government’s executive branch.