Does Salience Matter? The Impact of Public Attention on Compliance with ECtHR Rulings

When thinking about what drives compliance with international law, scholars theorize that domestic politics may be key. These theories posit that international legal rulings may help in shifting the political agenda or help local activists to mobilize, increasing the pressure for compliance. This chapter investigates these claims by studying how public attention impacts compliance with international legal rulings. Drawing on a novel dataset measuring case-specific public attention, this chapter studies the impact of public attention on compliance with ECtHR rulings. Given that the same factors that may increase public attention might also impact the likelihood of swift compliance, and that public attention also depends on the availability of alternative newsworthy events, this chapter exploits the exogenous variation in public attention at the time of a ruling, caused by natural disasters, to disentangle the effect of public attention on compliance. The results suggest that public attention is associated with faster compliance.