International law and international reputation in Brazil

• Grant number: 14/07489-8
• Support Opportunities: Research Grants - Visiting Researcher Grant - International
• Start date: November 24, 2014
• End date: November 29, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Political Science - International Politics
• Principal Investigator: Amâncio Jorge Silva Nunes de Oliveira
• Grantee: Amâncio Jorge Silva Nunes de Oliveira
• Visiting researcher: Matthew Winters
• Visiting researcher institution: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States
• Host Institution: Instituto de Relações Internacionais (IRI). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The responsibility for maintaining a state's international legal reputation ultimately rests with the elite actors who make decisions about state behavior. These actors make decisions, however, in the context of mass public opinion about how the state should act. Although not the sole driver of geopolitical decisions, the sense that citizens have of whether or not their state should comply with international law has purchase on the calculations of political decision makers, and the instinct to preserve national reputation is therefore partly motivated by mass public opinion.Reputational concerns may be particularly relevant for rising international powers like Brazil. As Brazil takes on increased regional and global responsibility, its reputation becomes an increasingly valuable commodity. Placed in a position where Brazil may be seeking to make international law - through bilateral, regional or global treaties - the country's existing reputation can either facilitate or hinder its ability to play a leadership role in global affairs. To what extent are the dynamics implicit in the reputational theory of international law at work in Brazil? In this project, we seek to better understand mass public opinion in Brazil with regard to international law. In particular, we seek to see if Brazilian citizens perceive differential costs to the violation of international law depending on the manner in which the law was created and Brazil's level of participation in the creation of the law. Our results will provide general evidence with regard to the role of mass public opinion in the reputational theory of international law and specific evidence about Brazilian citizens' sense of the risks to their national reputation from violating international law. The results will help us to better situate Brazil as a regional and global player that is taking an increasingly prominent role on the international stage. We expect to identify the greatest perceived risk to reputation among our respondents when Brazil is considering violating non-consensus-based international law that it has helped to design. The second greatest reputational risk comes from violating traditional, consensus-based international law. To better understand how Brazilians react to international legal commitments, we propose to use an experiment embedded in a representative public opinion survey. Each of our survey respondents will hear one of four randomly selected vignettes about a costly international legal obligation faced by Brazil. In the control condition, we will not make any reference to the way in which the international law was created. (AU)