Abstract
On April 9th, 2024, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) delivered a bold and historical judgment in the case of KlimaSeniorinnen and Others v. Switzerland (“Klimaseniorinnen”). This case was brought before the ECtHR by four women and a Swiss association, Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz, that alleged that the Swiss authorities were “not taking sufficient action to mitigate the effects of climate change” and that global warming has consequences on their living conditions and health (European Court of Human Rights 2024). The ECtHR found that the “Convention encompasses a right to effective protection by the State authorities from the serious adverse effects of climate change on lives, health, well-being and quality of life” and that “the Swiss Confederation had failed to comply with its duties under the Convention concerning climate change” (European Court of Human Rights 2024). Since then, the case has been heavily debated in the Swiss press and abroad, and different politicians have expressed concerns about its impact and even the legitimacy of this case (Blattner 2024). For example, the rightwing Swiss People’s Party (Schweizerische Volkspartei, SVP) released a statement declaring the ruling “unacceptable” and calling for Switzerland to withdraw from the Council of Europe (Schweizerische Volkspartei 2024).
Previous research suggests that citizens are sensitive to international court rulings. For example, Pelc (2013) found that US citizens are concerned about their country's non-compliance with international trade law. When a trade partner accuses the United States of not complying with the rules of the World Trade Organization, people look for information online.
The perception of the legitimacy of international organizations is also important. International relations scholars have been studying the effect of legitimacy on international law and international organizations (IOs). For example, recent research has focused on IOs self-legitimization practices for twenty-eight years (Schmidtke and Lenz 2023; Schmidtke et al. 2023). Dingwerth et al. (2019) show an increase in the politicization of international organizations' legitimacy and how this pushes IOs to legitimize themselves more toward the citizens of their member states. Schlipphak, Meiners, and Kiratli (2022) implemented a survey experiment on public legitimacy beliefs on the WHO during the COVID-19 crisis and showed that international crisis make IOs more salient that are mandated to solve the respective crisis. Dellmuth and Tallberg (2021) looked at the effects of elite communication on citizen perceptions of IO’s legitimacy and found that negative messages are more effective than positive ones in altering citizens’ perceptions.
Other research has shown how legitimacy can come from the norms and rules that support IOs and how normative legitimacy is important to create and maintain compliance (Hurd, 2019; Reus-Smit, 2007; Tallberg & Zürn, 2019). However, much of this research focuses only on compliance from a state perspective.
In this paper we focus on sociological approaches to legitimacy that emphasize people's belief towards an arrangement (Roozendaal and Deugd 2022, 91). Sociological approaches to legitimacy – sometimes called descriptive legitimacy or empirical legitimacy – are rooted in subjects' perceptions which “define the degree of acceptance of a norm” (Reid, 2020, p. 91). Following Suchman (1995, 574), we define legitimacy as “a generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions”. Legitimacy is, therefore, a social process that is dependent on social perception and recognition (Reus-Smit 2007).
Little research has focused on the impact citizens' perceptions have on compliance with rulings from international courts. In addition, we know little about how additional information about court decisions can affect citizen’s legitimacy perceptions, support for decision compliance, policy support, and voting behavior. We thus seek to address this research gap with an experimental design, in which we randomly provide information about the ECtHR court decision in the case of KlimaSeniorinnen and Others v. Switzerland (“Klimaseniorinnen”) to half of the respondents in our sample and then compare responses to a control group that did not receive this information. We run a field- and survey-experiment with a representative sample of Swiss citizens and permanent residents (+18) years in the French and German speaking part of Switzerland. The sample is provided by the Swiss Federal Statistical Office. We conduct two survey waves. The first wave is conducted in early May 2024 just before the direct democratic vote on renewable energies on the 9th of June 2024 (the referendum on the so-called Electricity law that aims to accelerate the installation of renewable energy, especially open-space solar PV and wind plants in Switzerland).
Specifically, we seek to answer the following research questions with our experiment:
RQ1: How does information provision about the case of KlimaSeniorinnen and Others v. Switzerland (“Klimaseniorinnen”) affect the perceived legitimacy of the decision made by the ECtHR?
RQ2: How does information provision about the case of KlimaSeniorinnen and Others v. Switzerland (“Klimaseniorinnen”) affect the perceived fairness of the decision made by the ECtHR?
RQ3: How does information provision about the case of KlimaSeniorinnen and Others v. Switzerland (“Klimaseniorinnen”) affect the perceived need to alter the level of Swiss climate policy ambition?
RQ4: How does information provision about the case of KlimaSeniorinnen and Others v. Switzerland (“Klimaseniorinnen”) affect the support for the Swiss government to comply with the decision made by the ECtHR?
RQ5: How does information provision about the case of KlimaSeniorinnen and Others v. Switzerland (“Klimaseniorinnen”) affect the support for different climate mitigation policies?
RQ6: How does information provision about the case of KlimaSeniorinnen and Others v. Switzerland (“Klimaseniorinnen”) affect the intended and revealed voting for different climate mitigation policies?
Related to the mediation effects of information provision:
RQ7: To what extent is the effect of information provision about the case of KlimaSeniorinnen and Others v. Switzerland (“Klimaseniorinnen”) on compliance support, climate policy ambition, climate policy support, intended and revealed voting behavior mediated by changes in perceived legitimacy and perceived fairness of the court decision?
Related to the moderation effects of information provision:
RQ8: To what extent is the effect of information provision about the case of KlimaSeniorinnen and Others v. Switzerland (“Klimaseniorinnen”) on perceived decision legitimacy, perceived decision fairness, compliance support, climate policy ambition, climate policy support, intended and revealed voting behavior moderated by individuals trust into courts, prior court legitimacy perceptions, and political ideology?