When do international institutions promote economic cooperation among countries? The World Trade Organization (WTO) is central to the multilateral trade regime and a benchmark for international dispute resolution. Yet there are few attempts to measure its effectiveness in restoring trade cooperation. This paper uses WTO disputes to examine the impact of domestic politics in the defendant country on compliance with adverse legal rulings. I build a novel data set on compliance. Using the method of synthetic case control, I estimate the effect of adverse rulings on trade flows between disputant countries using product-level time-series trade data. I infer the defendant complied if trade flows increased after the dispute, relative to estimated levels that would have occurred in the absence of the ruling. The estimates show compliance problems are both widespread and systematically linked to domestic politics. Domestic political divisions—measured by veto players—hinder compliance. ∗Department of Political Science, University of California, Davis, lperitz@ucdavis.edu. This project has benefited from generous feedback from Leslie Johns, Jeff Lewis, Krzysztof Pelc, Art Stein, Richard Steinberg, and Jana von Stein. All remaining errors are my own.

中文翻译：

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国际机构什么时候有效？国内否决权参与者对遵守WTO裁决的影响

国际机构何时能促进国家间的经济合作？世界贸易组织（WTO）是多边贸易体制的核心，是解决国际争端的基准。然而，几乎没有尝试来衡量其在恢复贸易合作中的有效性。本文使用WTO争端来考察被告国国内政治对遵守不利法律裁决的影响。我建立了一个新的合规性数据集。使用综合案例控制方法，我使用产品级时间序列贸易数据来估计不利裁决对争议国家之间贸易流量的影响。我推断，相对于在没有裁决的情况下可能发生的估计水平，在争端之后贸易流量是否增加，被告已经遵守。估计显示，合规问题既广泛存在，又与国内政治系统地联系在一起。由否决权人衡量的国内政治分歧会阻碍合规性。∗加州大学戴维斯分校政治科学系，lperitz @ ucdavis.edu。该项目得益于Leslie Johns，Jeff Lewis，Krzysztof Pelc，Art Stein，Richard Steinberg和Jana von Stein的慷慨反馈。所有其余的错误都是我自己的。