📌 What the Paper Asks: How does backlash from consolidated democracies shape the behavior of liberal international institutions? The core argument is that liberal institutions have incentives to appease democratic critics because they depend on democratic support for continued effectiveness and can accommodate democratic critics at a lower legitimacy cost than non-democratic challengers.

🗂️ New Dataset of ECHR Rulings and Government Positions

• A dataset of European Court of Human Rights rulings up to 2019.
• A coding of government positions recorded during multiple multilateral reform conferences.

🔎 How the Effect Was Identified

• A research design that combines matching with a difference-in-differences (diff-in-diff) approach to compare outcomes for states that criticized the Court to similar states that did not.

📌 Key Findings

• Strong evidence that the Court exercises restraint toward consolidated democracies that criticized it in multilateral reform conferences: these states receive fewer violation judgments.
• Additional evidence that some governments have recently appointed more deferential judges to the Court.

⚖️ Why This Matters

• Backlash from democratic critics can alter the behavior of liberal international institutions even without threats of membership exit. The results imply that democratic criticism can shape both adjudicatory outcomes and judicial staffing, with implications for the legitimacy and autonomy of supranational courts.