On the causal (in)significance of legal status: a comparative analysis of compliance with binding and non-binding human rights decisions in Europe and the Americas

Abstract The expected benefits and drawbacks of making international governance instruments legally binding or non-binding have received a fair share of attention in the institutional design literature, yet the relative effectiveness of instruments with different legal force in inducing compliance has received little direct comparative analysis. In this study, we undertake such direct comparison of relative compliance with decisions in individual human rights complaints cases. We do so by taking advantage of jurisdictional overlap between the regional human rights courts in Europe and the Americas, which issue legally binding judgments, and the UN human rights treaty bodies, whose “views” are legally non-binding. Theoretically, we expect the rule of law to play a key causal role, increasing compliance with judgments compared to compliance with views. Employing exact matching and survival analysis, we test these conjectures with an original dataset that comprises information on judgments and views against the same sets of states. Results confirm that legal bindingness increases the chances of full compliance. We also find that, counterintuitively, the distinctive relative impact of legal bindingness on compliance is stronger for non-rule-of-law states.