Perception and Process: Towards a Behavioural Theory of Compliance

Abstract

Nowhere is the integration of behavioural insights into international legal theory more important than in relation to compliance. Such insights offer the potential to give us a more accurate understanding of how states behave, permitting both the development of more effective, empirically grounded normative propositions for legal and institutional change, as well as the creation of more convincing theories of compliance. Drawing on theoretical, empirical and experimental studies from political science and international relations, the article suggests that we need to understand compliance decision-making as a broader process that requires analysis of how and why decision-makers perceive new information the way that they do, and how the process by which they make decisions, such as their style of reasoning, might affect decision outcomes. To develop this point, the article uses data from international financial institutions and a novel sentiment analysis of Argentinian parliamentary debates to test empirically hypotheses generated by realist, liberal, and constructivist theories of compliance, the results of which demonstrate the benefit of adopting a behavioural approach to compliance.