From paper tigers to engines of change: The effect of international human rights tribunals on domestic practice and policy

Why do states comply with international human rights tribunals' rulings? This dissertation aims to answer this question through a multi-method study of the Inter-American and European human rights courts. This research suggests that states use compliance with human rights tribunals' rulings to signal their commitment to human rights to domestic and international audiences. Constraints on the executive, particularly independent judiciaries and competitive elections, limit the ability of the executive to control the compliance process and the policies that result from complying with the tribunals' rulings. By constraining the executive's ability to shape the outcomes of compliance and allowing compliance to snowball into larger and costlier policy changes, these domestic institutions and the ex ante policy costs they represent help to render compliance a credible signal of governments' commitments to human rights.;At the heart of this dissertation is a unique and newly constructed dataset on states' compliance with the discrete obligations the European and Inter-American Courts of Human Rights ask states to fulfill. Statistical analysis of this data suggests that states are more likely to comply with the tribunals' rulings when they have the executive constraints in place that are necessary to make compliance a credible signal of their human rights commitments. Further, the analyses find that even governments of the strongest democracies and rights-respecting states reach for compliance when they face domestic political opposition or instability and need to bolster their reputation for respecting human rights and the rule of law. Case studies of six countries---Argentina, Brazil and Colombia, as well as Portugal, Russia and the United Kingdom---examine these compliance processes in more depth. By examining the signaling properties of international law, this research challenges existing theoretical explanations of compliance and contributes to an important and lively debate about the future of international human rights adjudication and the limits and possibilities of international human rights law in shaping domestic politics and policy.