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Home-State Interest, Nationalism, and the Legitimacy of the International Criminal Court

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2021

Nathan T. Carrington Open the ORCID record for Nathan T. Carrington [Opens in a new window]  and
Claire Sigsworth Open the ORCID record for Claire Sigsworth [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

Although legitimacy is crucial for courts’ efficacy, the sources identified as legitimizing domestic institutions are weaker or absent altogether for international institutions. We use an original, preregistered, nationally representative survey experiment to show that perceived home-state interest strongly affects the legitimacy afforded by UK citizens to the International Criminal Court. Importantly, this relationship is moderated by nationalism. Our findings have implications for state actors in a position to act vis-á-vis international courts, elites seeking to alter opinions toward courts, and courts themselves weighing possible institutional costs of acting against noncompliant states.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 47 , Issue 2 , May 2022 , pp. 449 - 477
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Bar Foundation

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Footnotes

The authors are listed in alphabetical order and contributed equally in the production of this article. We would like to thank Emma Fountain, Colin French, Shana Gadarian, Laura Jenkins, Thomas Keck, Emily Thorson, participants at the 2019 Law and Society Association Annual Meeting and the 2019 Institute for Humane Studies Graduate Student Research Colloquium, and the four anonymous reviewers for helpful feedback and suggestions. We would also like to thank the Campbell Public Affairs Institute for its financial support for this project. The experiments discussed in this article were conducted with the oversight and approval of the Syracuse University Institutional Review Board, Protocol nos. 21-015 and 19-120, and the main experiment was preregistered with the Open Science Framework prior to data collection. All hypothesis testing described in this article is consistent with the pre-registered plan.

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