Who Cares if We Violate the Geneva Convention?

Is international law effective? The United States is routinely accused of violating it. Many maintain that international law cannot possibly hold sway over sovereign nations. However, other scholars argue that international laws do effectively influence domestic policy: they lend information and legitimacy to domestic groups, allowing them to sway popular opinion and thus influence the government. In a January 2013 article in International Organization, “International Law and Public Attitudes Toward Torture: An Experimental Study,” Geoffrey P.R. Wallace tests this theory by examining whether knowledge about international law influences the American public’s opinions on the use of torture.

Wallace conducted an experiment using two separate surveys of a random sample of American adults. The first, administered to 2,737 respondents in 2008, gave people a scenario involving a prisoner of war and asked about their approval of torture as a method to extract information. A random segment of respondents, the treatment group, were informed of the fact that torture is illegal under international law. Some were also told that the prisoners were “insurgents” and others were told that the prisoners’ government was abusing American POWs.

The results of the survey show that being informed of torture’s illegality had a significant negative effect on respondents’ opinions; 44 percent of the control group approved of torture versus only 38 percent of the treatment group. Furthermore, the effect was larger on those who had been told that the POWs were insurgents and those that were told that American POWs were being abused. Wallace suggests that this indicates that knowledge of international law has a dampening effect on the impulse for retaliation. However, these effects depend greatly on an individual’s ideology. The treatment reduced liberals’ approval of torture by 10 percentage points, but its effect on conservatives’ approval was statistically indistinguishable from zero.

Wallace also conducted a second survey in 2010 to parse out which aspects of international law resonate with the American public. He isolates three distinct aspects of the “legalization” of an international law: obligation (whether the law is binding), precision (how clearly and specifically a law defines key terms), and delegation (whether a third party, like the World Trade Organization, has the right to enforce a law). The second survey of 6,101 respondents again asked their opinion on torture while emphasizing different aspects of international law.

Wallace finds that the level of obligation has no discernible effect on public opinion, whereas respondents who were told that international law has a high level of precision were eight percentage points less likely to approve of torture than those who were told that the language is imprecise. Delegation also has a negative effect; being told that there is a high level of delegation reduced approval by five percentage points.

The survey again shows marked differences in response depending on a respondent’s ideology; conservatives were much more likely to be influenced by high levels of legalization. Being told that international law has a high degree of precision reduced conservatives’ approval rating by nine percentage points, versus four for liberals; and being told there are high levels of delegation reduced conservatives’ approval rating by six percentage points, while the effect on liberals was statistically insignificant.

Wallace believes that his analysis provides strong evidence to support the importance of domestic opinion in international law. He also argues that his results highlight the importance of political ideology in how domestic groups respond to foreign policy; only highly-legalized treaties are capable of shifting conservative preferences. However, he cautions that more work needs to be done to investigate the robustness of his findings in different scenarios.

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