Replication Data for:Dealing with Clashes of International Law: A Microlevel Study of Climate and Trade

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).多年来，国际关系领域的学者一直围绕机制复杂性（regime complexity）及其影响展开相关研究。然而，学界目前仍缺乏对民众在评估国内政策时，如何应对国际法律义务冲突这一问题的认知。本文聚焦于：当本国政府制定国内法律以落实国际义务时，民众对政府遵守与违反国际法的关注程度。具体而言，我们旨在探究民众对国际义务冲突的反应，究竟是源于对本国因违反国际法而遭受国际追责（即本文所称的“曝光成本”）的担忧，还是对切实物质成本的顾虑。本研究的实证分析依托于一项嵌入瑞士民众环境态度调查的实验。实验结果首先表明，民众会对国际法遵守与违反的相关信息做出反应，但相较于遵守相关信息，违反国际法的负面信息引发的态度转变更为显著。其次，我们发现：相较于物质成本（即面临报复）相关信息，本国在违反国际法时将面临国际司法裁决（即本文所称的“曝光成本”）的相关信息，对民众态度的影响更为显著。