Checkel why comply

In the second and third sections, I address this gap, advancing hypotheses on the roles of social learning and persuasion in compliance, and exploring the methodological challenges involved in measuring them.

The conclusion suggests how my analysis advances the constructivist research agenda, highlights the importance of institutional factors in compliance studies, and argues for greater attention to the development of scope conditions in the debate between rationalists and social constructivists. Before proceeding, three caveats are in order. First, the constructivism favored in this essay belongs to what has been called its modernist branch.

These scholars combine an ontological stance critical of methodological individualism with a loosely causal epistemology; analytically, they have focused on the role of norms in social life, demonstrating they matter in a constitutive, interest-shaping way not captured by rationalist arguments.

Given my empirically informed hunch that compliance sometimes involves such interest redefinition, this more recent work should prove useful. Such an emphasis leads one too readily to bracket the intervening processes of social interaction through which agents reach such an end state.

Consistent with these differences in analytic emphasis are temporal ones: Constructivist studies of socialization often encompass many years or even decades, while regime compliance research is typically more temporally limited. When studying compliance -- and to minimize reliance on correlational arguments -- I consider not only the observable degree of it among particular agents, but also explore the changing motives and attitudes that lead them to act in accordance with normative prescriptions.

Put differently, speech and language, in contrast to much mainstream compliance research, will play central roles in my analysis.

The concern is how one could develop, and apply to studies of compliance, constructivist insights on mechanisms of social choice. Empirically, I seek only to establish the plausibility of such propositions, and do so in three ways: 1 by drawing upon arguments and evidence from existing studies; 2 by reference to my own work in progress; and 3 where appropriate, by conducting counterfactual analysis. Instead, the focus is the underlying assumptions and theories of choice upon which these scholars build explanations of compliance.

Regime Theory, International Bargaining and Compliance. Much like the broader subfield international relations theory and discipline political science to which they belong, regime scholars privilege an asocial methodological individualism and consequentialist choice mechanisms in their studies. While analysts may employ differing labels -- neo-utilitarian, contractualist, interest-based, etc -- to describe the process through which actors comply with regime injunctions, a common set of assumptions unites them.

For one, compliance is a game of altering strategies and behavior which, admittedly, is sometimes all important ; in a fundamental sense, then, agents leave a regime or its institutional home as they entered it. The underlying ontology is thus decidedly individualist. No one would deny that such research captures an important part of empirical reality, especially if one examines, as many analysts do, coercive international bargaining.

For sure, there has always been a lively dissenting view to these dominant perspectives within both the regime and bargaining literatures. Allusions to learning, internalization and persuasion -- buzzwords to which any constructivist could subscribe -- as the dynamics producing compliance are strong in this research.

Indeed, Haas and his students Ruggie, Adler have consistently argued that agents do not only and always power; they also puzzle. As a result, the strategies and, perhaps, underlying preferences of these agents are in flux; they are thus open to learning. In the bargaining literature, recent work has begun to stress that compliance decisions of agents cannot be fully understood without consideration of background social context and contemporaneous -- during the negotiations themselves -- social interaction.

This trend within IR intersects with a long-running tradition among scholars of the European Union EU , many of whom emphasize the non-strategic and socially constructed bases of compliance, be it in Brussels or at the national level. These are valid arguments, and seem to capture an important part of the reality of compliance dynamics -- internationally or within Europe. However, they have most often been advanced as a heuristic claim, with key terms consequently underspecified.

In sum, rationalist regime compliance and bargaining scholars possess vigorous research programs that have yielded cumulable insights on compliance dynamics. Unfortunately, their explanatory reach is limited by a restrictive set of ontological assumptions. A second set of regime and bargaining analysts relaxes these assumptions, but has failed to generate robust empirical findings of its own.

Overall, then, among students of regime compliance and bargaining, there is a dominant answer to the question of why social actors comply: strategic calculation. Constructivism and Compliance. Early empirical research by constructivists did not explicitly ask why actors comply with social norms. Instead, their focus was often later stages of compliance, where internalization full socialization had almost occurred; this led many scholars to bracket the processes through which this end state was reached.

At this late stage, however, compliance is not an issue of choice in any meaningful sense; agent behavior is rule governed and driven by certain logics of appropriateness. More recent constructivist studies rectify these problems by placing greater emphasis on both process and agency.

A first argues that domestic actors such as NGOs, trade unions or the like exploit international norms to generate pressures for compliance on state decisionmakers, and do so in relative isolation from broader transnational ties. Here, empirical examples are typically drawn from the industrialized West, with the argument apparently being that these well established and, in some cases, militarily powerful states are less susceptible to transnational pressures.

Recently, a more sophisticated variant of the protest dynamic has been elaborated. In this case, non-state actors and policy networks, at both the national and transnational level, are united in their support for norms; they then mobilize and coerce decisionmakers to comply with them. The norms themselves, however, are often not internalized by elites. The activities of Greenpeace exemplify this political pressure mechanism.

For elites, the answer seems clear: Norms are simply a behavioral constraint and not internalized. Their compliance is easily explained by standard rationalist models, which view social structures in this behavioral, constraining sense. At the grass-roots, activist, NGO-level, systematic explanations for compliance are much less clear. However, in many other instances, norms produce compliance in ways better captured by rationalist arguments -- for example, by creating focal points in the domestic arena, or simply being used instrumentally by agents NGOs, say to advance given interests.

Put differently, these scholars, like many regime and bargaining theorists, emphasize the role of sanctioning in promoting compliance. Normatively, elite policymakers are portrayed as bad; empirically, they are viewed as passive and reactive; ontologically, they are too often viewed solely as calculating agents.

Consider the recent Risse, Ropp and Sikkink volume that explores the connection between international human rights norms and patterns of domestic compliance. Here, the preferences of elites do not change at early stages; rather, compliance occurs through changes in behaviors and strategies only. Temporally expanding the model, Risse, et al , argue that at later points in the process perhaps five years to a decade , elites become less reactive and, indeed, may comply because they have internalized new preferences.

Why these biases? On the former, recent years have seen an exciting fusion of two literatures: studies on the diffusion of global norms by constructivists; and work on social movements that sits at the intersection of sociology and political science.

This synthesis allowed constructivists to explain better the mobilization dynamics they saw norms and other social constructs generating in various settings; more important, thanks to the strong emphasis on agency in the social movements literature SML , it promoted a greater theoretical balance between structure and agency in their accounts.

This inter-disciplinary exchange had costs, however. First, constructivists have ended up incorporating in their accounts the individualist ontologies and consequentialist choice mechanisms that play central roles in SML. My claim is not that these scholars now portray agents as only pursuing material interests. Although, this may be true in some cases.

By itself, this is absolutely no problem; however, it has made less clear what is the constructivist value added in such individualist-consequentialist compliance accounts. Indeed, the modernist constructivism of interest here is distinguished not so much by its epistemological stance, which is a pluralistic mixture of positivist and interpretative approaches, but by its ontology -- mutual constitution.

Consequential choice mechanisms may be consistent with this ontology, but it is hard to reconcile it with individualism. Second, research on social movements -- as the name implies -- is strongly and, indeed, normatively biased against granting causal primacy to statist variables.

For two reasons, however, it will be difficult to generalize from arguments about compliance and socialization in this policy domain.

For one, international human rights norms, and the institutions and transnational social movements that promote them, are increasingly institutionalized and robust. In this area, it thus makes sense to give less causal weight to domestic agency and other national-level factors -- as much of the new literature does.

Moreover, many of these human-rights studies focus -- not surprisingly -- on rogue or authoritarian states. Such polities and their elites are eminently status-quo oriented, wanting to maintain the current repressive state of affairs; the initial agenda setting and mobilization comes from below, as recent work has vividly documented.

Yet, in many other issue areas, the state and its elites may well take the lead in the political process. In part, this is understandable. The shaming activities of Amnesty International, say, are very much in the public and scholarly eye, and undoubtedly play a major role in spurring compliance. Yet, the danger in overemphasizing this particular mechanism is not only empirical neglecting other possible compliance dynamics at the national level , but ontological.

The broader constructivist literature points to just such a dynamic, however, in what I call a social learning mechanism. Here, it is not political pressure but learning that leads to agent compliance with normative prescriptions. This process appears to be based on notions of complex learning drawn from cognitive and social psychology, where individuals, when exposed to the prescriptions embodied in norms, adopt new interests.

At this point, constructivist work on compliance thus intersects with the studies by cognitive regime theorists, Europeanists and the newer bargaining research mentioned earlier. Building on the intersection of these various literatures, I seek to specify better the arguments on learning that are common to them. My starting point is that while these scholars have made powerful heuristic cases for its importance, there has been insufficient attention to operationalizing the concept in a manner amenable to systematic empirical testing.

Along the way, I am attentive to the political and institutional variables that are often neglected in analyses of this type. To begin, what does it mean for an agent to learn? In a very fundamental sense, rationalists and social constructivists answer this question differently. While it is true that rational choice analysis has come to accord a role of sorts to learning, such work falls short of fully capturing the multiple ways it is causally important in social life.

In particular, because of their adherence to methodological individualism, rationalists cannot model the interaction context during which agent interests may change. A direct consequence of such a stance is to portray learning in highly individualist terms. For example, some rationalists talk of Bayesian updating, where, after each discrete interaction, actors update their strategies and -- perhaps -- preferences.

At a later point that is, after the interaction , this information may be used to alter strategies, but not preferences, which are given. The result is to bracket the interaction context through which agent interests and identities may change. Specifically, the constructivist value added should be to explore complex social learning, which involves a process whereby agent interests and identities are shaped through and during interaction.

So defined, social learning involves a break with strict forms of methodological individualism; it thus differs significantly from the rationalist work surveyed above. Consider small group settings. Empirically, it is clear there are times when agents acquire new preferences through interaction in such social contexts. This is not to deny periods of strategic exchange, where self-interested actors seek to maximize utility; yet, to emphasize the latter dynamic to the near exclusion of the former is an odd distortion of social reality.

More specifically, this research suggests four hypotheses on when social learning occurs. H 2 Social learning is more likely where the group feels itself in a crisis or is faced with clear and incontrovertible evidence of policy failure.

H 3 Social learning is more likely where a group meets repeatedly and there is high density of interaction among participants. H 4 Social learning is more likely when a group is insulated from direct political pressure and exposure.

Clearly, these hypotheses require further elaboration. For example, can a crisis situation be specified a priori , and not in a post-hoc fashion as is typically done? When is the density of interaction among group participants sufficiently high for a switch to occur from strategic exchange to interactive learning? The deductions also point to a powerful role for communication. Indeed, implicit above are underlying mechanisms of persuasion and argumentation, on which the social learning literature has been largely silent.

Put differently, these literatures, with their reliance on notions of bounded rationality and heuristic cuing, are still individualist in nature. Not surprisingly, constructivists, drawing upon these literatures, have fallen into the same individualist trap. Instead, these domestic agents listen, something goes on between the earlobes, and their values subsequently change.

While this work is as varied as most, it can usefully be categorized along two dimensions: types and settings of persuasion. Regarding types, there is a fundamental distinction between manipulative and argumentative persuasion. In contrast, argumentative persuasion is, for most analysts, a social process of interaction that involves changing attitudes about cause and effect in the absence of overt coercion; it is thus a mechanism through which social learning may occur, leading to interest redefinition and identity change.

As for settings, researchers have emphasized three: interpersonal, persuasion and mass media. Studies of persuasion and, especially, interpersonal settings typically emphasize argumentative persuasion, while those involving mass media not surprisingly key on the manipulative sort. The persuasion literature is not without its own theoretical, methodological failings. In particular, two are worth highlighting. First, much of this work, owing to its disciplinary roots in social psychology, proceeds via inductive theorizing.

One result has been a failure to develop middle-range theory specifying scope conditions when, under what conditions is argumentative persuasion more likely to work, etc.

Below, I advance five such conditions; however, given the inductive approach, diversity and occasional contradictions within the literature, these should be viewed as preliminary. Second, many persuasion researchers, again due to their disciplinary background, have emphasized experimental or survey methods.

Too often, this has led them to bracket the social interaction context through which persuasion occurs. These caveats aside, the literature allows one to advance five propositions on when agents should be especially open to argumentative persuasion. H 5 Argumentative persuasion is more likely to be effective when the persuadee is in a novel and uncertain environment and thus cognitively motivated to analyze new information. H 7 Argumentative persuasion is more likely to be effective when the persuader is an authoritative member of the in-group to which the persuadee belongs or wants to belong.

H 9 Argumentative persuasion is more likely to be effective when the persuader-persuadee interaction occurs in less politicized and more insulated settings.

This focus on argumentative persuasion has several benefits. First, it highlights and begins to operationalize the obvious -- but neglected in both mainstream and constructivist compliance analysis -- roles of communication and social interaction.

While this is surely overstated, it does alert us to our impoverished analytic tool kit for exploring its role. Second, this focus restores a sense of agency to the social norms that may be central to learning.

In sum, the value added of this micro-level constructivist cut at compliance is to expand our repertoire of answers to the question: Why do social actors comply? In some cases, they do so by learning new interests through processes of communication and persuasion.

The ontology and understanding of social reality here is not individualist, but relational: I take seriously the dynamics of social interaction.

Finally, this approach is not method-driven: It develops scope conditions recognizing that social learning, persuasion and compliance with norms often do not occur.

In turn, this leaves plenty of analytic space for rationalist arguments, as the cases below demonstrate. Recall that my empirical concern is to document the processes and motivations through which agents come to comply with norms. Were you a supplicant? On the latter, I gave interviewees several possibilities, including both their own cognitive uncertainty as well as external social pressure. I also suggested answers that addressed materialist incentives changing citizenship practice might allow more immigrants to access a decreasing social-welfare pie , as well as identity concerns changing citizenship practice would dilute the Germanness -- say -- of the country.

In designing and conducting the interviews, I paid particular attention to both temporal and intersubjective dimensions. This not only allowed for establishing a degree of interviewer-interviewee rapport, which is crucial for in-depth questioning such as mine; it also enabled me to assess the validity of interviewee accounts. Were they consistent over time? If they changed, then why? Interviewees were then asked to rank order the various possibilities, and to consider whether their rankings changed over time.

Second, as a supplement and check on interview data, I carry out a content analysis of major media and specialist publications international law journals, reports produced by the NGO community, for example. This allowed for checking the beliefs and motivations of particular individuals who were both interviewees and participants in public debates.

Third, whenever necessary and possible, I consult official documentary records. For example, my first case below explores the supranational process through which the Council of Europe CE has come to promote revised European citizenship norms; this included a number of confidential meetings in Strasbourg of state representatives and CE bureaucrats.

I therefore sought and gained access to official summaries of those sessions. Fourth, I model a key temporal dimension: the evolution of domestic norms in my policy area citizenship and minority rights. Why this particular focus? Given my interest in compliance driven by emerging European norms, I thought it important also to ask what might create barriers to it.

Furthermore, drawing upon historical institutionalist insights, I argue that these norms gain particular staying power and political influence when they become institutionalized. Institutionalization is measured through indicators that are both bureaucratic norms embedded in organizations and legal norms incorporated into judicial codes, laws and constitutions.

Together, these techniques allow for a degree of triangulation when assessing the degree to which, and through what mechanism s , domestic agents comply with new regional norms, thus increasing confidence in the validity of my results.

I thus shrink the black box surrounding the social interaction context. I respond to this challenge in two ways. Methodologically, the use of multiple, process-oriented techniques allows me to carefully reconstruct accounts of actual agent motivations; equally important, they introduce an element of cross-checking. A second response questions the role of assumptions in theory building. The view informing my efforts is that, to the extent possible, we should replace assumptions with careful empirical analysis.

As has recently been argued:. For sure, the choice-theoretic critique of those who study preference formation is a well-taken and cautionary reminder of the difficulties involved in the enterprise. In the three cases that follow, I look for evidence of and reasons for compliance at various levels -- both supranationally and domestically. The examples given below are just that -- examples that seek to establish the plausibility of my approach, and not fully elaborated case studies.

Methodologically, in terms of outcomes, the following also suggests the crucial importance of employing counterfactual analysis. For constructivists, is the process oriented, micro-level focus outlined in the preceding sections a feasible undertaking? To date, my focus has been on Strasbourg and the Council of Europe CE , for this has been where the more serious, substantive work has occurred. I have been examining the Committee of Experts on Nationality, the group that was charged with revising earlier European understandings of citizenship that dated from the s.

My interest was to describe and explain what occurred in this group as it met over a four year period -- in particular, why it changed existing understandings on dual citizenship to remove the strict prohibition that had previously existed at the European level. To address such issues, I did the following.

Four rounds of field work were conducted in Strasbourg; during these trips, I interviewed various individuals who served on the Committee -- members of the Council Secretariat and experts. Then, I conducted interviews in several member-state capitals, meeting with national representatives to the committee of experts.

Finally, as a cross-check on interview data, more recently I was granted partial access to the confidential meeting summaries of the Committee. This was a considerable amount of work, but the pay off was high. Over time, particular individuals clearly shifted from what they viewed as a strategic bargaining game for example, seeking side payments to advance given interests to a process where basic preferences were rethought.

This shift was particularly evident on the question of dual citizenship, where a growing number of committee members came to view the existing prohibition as simply wrong. Instead, they agreed on a new understanding that viewed multiple nationality in a more positive light.

Processes of persuasion and learning were key in explaining why individual members began to comply with this emerging norm, and such dynamics were facilitated by four factors. First, Committee members shared a largely common educational and professional background, being trained as lawyers who had for many years dealt with issues of immigration and nationality H 1.

Second, the group was meeting at a time when there was a growing sense of policy failure: The number of dual nationals was climbing rapidly despite the existing prohibition H 2. This allowed it to meet and work out revised understandings on citizenship prior to any overt politicization of its work H 4, H 9. Fourth and perhaps most important, the Committee contained three members who were both highly respected by other group participants and renowned for their powers of persuasion.

That is, the Committee possessed effective persuaders who were authoritative members of the in-group H 7. At the same time, it should be stressed that not all committee members complied with the emerging norm or learned new interests. Indeed, one national representative held deeply ingrained beliefs that were opposed to arguments favoring a relaxation of prohibitions on dual citizenship.

Consistent with the above deductions H 6 , there is no evidence this individual was persuaded to alter his basic preferences. The point of this example is not to dismiss rationalist accounts of compliance. Some features of the site may not work correctly. DOI: Checkel Published 1 June Sociology International Organization Why do agents comply with the norms embedded in regimes and international institutions?

Scholars have proposed two competing answers to this compliance puzzle, one rationalist, the other constructivist. Both schools, however, explain important aspects of compliance. To build a bridge between them, I examine the role of argumentative… Expand. View on Cambridge Press. Save to Library Save. Create Alert Alert. Share This Paper. Background Citations. Methods Citations. Results Citations. Citation Type. Has PDF. Publication Type. More Filters. Abstract Why are some politicians guided by a sense of obligation toward international law but others are not?

Why do some politicians have a social as opposed to an egoistic preference over … Expand. Constructivism and International Law. Over the last decade or so a new dialogue has emerged between international relations IR theorists interested in the social creation of identity and who focus attention on the role of norms in … Expand.

Incomplete agreements and the limits of persuasion in international politics. Labels: Checkel , compliance , constructivism , Habermas , learning model , norms , persuasion , process tracing , rational choice. No comments:. Newer Post Older Post Home.

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