Words Matter: How WTO Rulings Handle Controversy
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The rulings of internationals courts are often reduced to “who won?,” but much more is at stake. Like other institutions, the World Trade Organization (WTO) offers rulings that balance legal discipline against political constraints. We argue that one way in which the WTO handles politically sensitive issues is by increasing the amount of affect in their rulings. In doing so, judges provide national governments with discursive resources to persuade their domestic audiences of the legitimacy of compliance. To test our expectations, we conduct a text analysis of all rulings rendered by the institution since 1995. Specifically, we find that more politically charged decisions, such as the ones concerning nonfiscal rather than fiscal aspects of national treatment claims, are explained in qualitatively different terms. We also find that, as an issue gets ruled on repeatedly, the amount of affect deployed progressively decreases. In sum, the WTO chooses its words strategically to persuade litigants, and their domestic audiences, of the legitimacy of compliance in politically fraught disputes.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it