Preferences or principles? The ‘noncompliance penalty’ and the limits of public support for the rule of law

Abstract

When will individuals support government noncompliance with the written law? A bedrock principle of the rule of law is that politicians who fail to comply with written law will face political consequences. Drawing on survey experiments fielded in two consolidated democracies, we introduce the noncompliance penalty , the loss of public support for a government action that contravenes the law. The results show that citizens do penalize governmental noncompliance with the law. However, we find that this penalty decreases if government noncompliance advances the policy interests of favored protest groups, and mixed evidence that this penalty increases with professed support for the rule of law. Perhaps surprisingly, our results suggest that citizens with the strongest commitment to the rule of law can become the most accepting of noncompliance if it advances their policy goals. These findings have important implications for understanding whether the public will punish politicians who disregard the formal letter of the law.