The past few decades have witnessed an explosion of judgments on social rights around the world. However, we know little about whether these rulings have been implemented. Social Rights Judgments and the Politics of Compliance is the first book to engage in a comparative study of compliance of social rights judgments as well as their broader effects. Covering fourteen different domestic and international jurisdictions, and drawing on multiple disciplines, it finds significant variance in outcomes and reveals both spectacular successes and failures in making social rights a reality on the ground. This variance is strikingly similar to that found in previous studies on civil rights, and the key explanatory factors lie in the political calculus of defendants and the remedial framework. The book also discusses which strategies have enhanced implementation, and focuses on judicial reflexivity, alliance building and social mobilisation.

This is the first book to map and explain compliance with judgments of social rights across multiple jurisdictions.

International politics has become increasingly legalized over the past fifty years, restructuring the way states interact with each other, international institutions, and their own constituents. The international legalization of human rights now makes it possible for individuals to take human rights claims against their governments at international courts such as the European and Inter-American Courts of Human Rights. This book brings together theories from international law, human rights and international relations to explain the increasingly important phenomenon of states' compliance with human rights tribunals' rulings. It argues that this is an inherently domestic affair. It posits three overarching questions: why do states comply with human rights tribunals' rulings? How does the compliance process unfold and what are the domestic political considerations around compliance? What effect does compliance have on the protection of human rights? The book answers these through a combination of quantitative analyses and in-depth case studies from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Italy, Portugal, Russia and the United Kingdom.

In Strategies of Compliance with the European Court of Human Rights, Andreas von Staden looks at the nature of human rights challenges in two enduring liberal democracies—Germany and the United Kingdom. Employing an ambitious data set that covers the compliance status of all European Court of Human Rights judgments rendered until 2015, von Staden presents a cross-national overview of compliance that illustrates a strong correlation between the quality of a country's democracy and the rate at which judgments have met compliance. Tracing the impact of violations in Germany and the United Kingdom specifically, he details how governments, legislators, and domestic judges responded to the court's demands for either financial compensation or changes to laws, policies, and practices. Framing his analysis in the context of the long-standing international relations debate between rationalists who argue that actions are dictated by an actor's preferences and cost-benefit calculations, and constructivists, who emphasize the influence of norms on behavior, von Staden argues that the question of whether to comply with a judgment needs to be analyzed separately from the question of how to comply. According to von Staden, constructivist reasoning best explains why Germany and the United Kingdom are motivated to comply with the European Court of Human Rights judgments, while rationalist reasoning in most cases accounts for how these countries bring their laws, policies, and practices into sufficient compliance for their cases to be closed. When complying with adverse decisions while also exploiting all available options to minimize their domestic impact, liberal democracies are thus both norm-abiding and rational-instrumentalist at the same time—in other words, they choose their compliance strategies rationally within the normative constraint of having to comply with the Court's judgments.

The book is the most comprehensive in its area and analyses many jurisdictions that have received little attention.

Jeff King argues in favour of constitutionalising social rights, and presents an incrementalist approach to judicial enforcement.

Captures significant transformations in the theory and practice of economic and social rights in constitutional and human rights law.