Courts and The Performance of International Organizations: Evidence from the European Union

This seminar is part of the "European Governance" program series.

The number of international courts/international tribunals has burgeoned in the past two decades, with the continued proliferation of international agreements and the growing importance of globalization for the world economy.  Do these courts matter?  We develop a theory of how an international court lacking any power to enforce its rulings can promote compliance among the member governments and enhance the performance of international agreements. We argue that the adjudication process can cause governments to comply with adverse rulings because it facilitates enforcement of the agreement by the other member states.  This argument implies two empirical predictions that we examine in the European Union using an original dataset of rulings of the European Court of Justice from 1960-1999. We show that ECJ rulings are sensitive to the enforcement concerns identified by our theory. Further, we show that ECJ rulings designed to liberalized trade (a key goal of the EU) are only effective when the adjudication process reveals that noncompliance will be punished by third-party governments.

Matthew Gabel is Professor of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester and and M.A. from the College of Europe (Bruges).  He is the associate editor of the journal European Union Politics.  His research has examined a variety of topics of international political economy and comparative political economy in Europe, particularly in the context of European integration.  This includes public support for European integration, judicial politics at European Court of Justice, and the legislative politics in the European Parliament. Separately, he also collaborates with Neurologists and Psychiatrists on the diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease.