Media Attention and Compliance With the European Court of Human Rights

Abstract

International courts lack traditional enforcement mechanisms. Scholars theorize that compliance with human rights rulings is therefore often driven by domestic processes, including political mobilization and parliamentary agenda setting. A necessary condition underlying these processes is attention to the rulings which is in part expected to be mediated by media attention. However, these conditions have not been explicitly addressed by the existing compliance literature. In this paper, we assess the impact of media attention to rulings by the European Court of the Human Rights on the likelihood of their implementation, using a novel dataset of case-specific news coverage. Exploiting exogenous variation in media attention caused by competing newsworthy events, we find that the probability of compliance increases, the more coverage a ruling receives. Our findings indicate that domestic news media play a key role for compliance with international courts.