🧭 Why This Question Matters

Constitutions often let people ask judges for binding orders to stop rights violations, but state agents sometimes ignore those orders. Making noncompliance visible could let courts use public pressure to enforce rulings. However, exposing people to information about noncompliance might also lead some to accept high levels of noncompliance and reduce support for judicial remedies.

🔎 How Compliance Was Measured

A rigorous tracking study estimated the rate at which state actors fail to comply with judicial orders in the Colombian tutela system (the constitutional remedy that directs state agents to remedy rights violations).

📋 How the Public Reacted (Research Design)

• The estimated noncompliance rate from the tracking study was embedded into three separate survey experiments.
• Each experiment was fielded to online national quota samples to capture broad public reactions.

📊 Key Findings

• The reported noncompliance rate was widely viewed as highly unacceptable by respondents.
• This negative reaction held across a variety of mitigating factors that were tested in the experiments.
• Public responses to information about noncompliance, however, varied with individuals’ prior expectations about compliance.

💡 What This Means

• Making judicial noncompliance observable tends to generate public condemnation of noncompliance rather than resignation.
• Because reactions depend on prior expectations, understanding cognitive and expectation-based processes is crucial for predicting when public pressure will support judicial enforcement.

⚖️ Implications

• Findings inform debates about transparency, judicial credibility, and enforcement: visibility of noncompliance can mobilize public disapproval, but its effect is shaped by what people already expect.
• The results highlight the importance of incorporating cognitive psychology insights into political-legal scholarship on compliance and remedies.