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"international agreements"
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Promises or Policies? An Experimental Analysis of International Agreements and Audience Reactions
A key assumption of audience costs theories of crisis bargaining and international cooperation is that audience members have strong preferences for consistency between their leader's commitments and actual policy choices. However, audiences also have strong preferences over the policy choices themselves, regardless of their consistency with past commitments. I conducted a randomized survey experiment to evaluate the magnitude of consistency and policy effects in the context of international agreements over trade policy. Respondents with expressed policy preferences, whether supporting or opposing free trade, have muted reactions to learning that their leader has broken an agreement. Only respondents with no opinion on trade policy are affected by learning that their leader's policy is inconsistent with prior commitments. This suggests that constituents' underlying preferences limit the degree to which audience costs influence policymakers' calculations.
Journal Article
The Politics of International Oversight: Strategic Monitoring and Legal Compliance in the European Union
States often violate international agreements, both accidentally and intentionally. To process complaints efficiently, states can create formal, pretrial procedures in which governments can negotiate with litigants before a case ever goes to court. If disputes are resolved during pretrial negotiations, it can be very difficult to tell what has happened. Are governments coming into compliance? If so, are they only doing so when they have accidentally committed a violation or even when they are intentionally resisting? Or are challenges simply being dropped? This paper presents a formal model to address these questions. We develop our theory in the context of the European Union (EU). To test our model, we collect a new dataset of over 13,000 Commission infringement cases against EU member states (2003–2013). Our results suggest that accidental and intentional noncompliance both occur, but that intentional noncompliance is more common in the EU. We find that the Commission is an effective, if imperfect, monitor and enforcer of international law. The Commission can correct intentional noncompliance, but not always. It strategically drops cases that it believes it is unlikely to win.
Journal Article
Negotiating regime complexity: Following a regime complex in the making
This article broadens the understanding and empirical study of regime complexes by shifting the focus from the negotiation outcome to the processes of negotiating new international agreements. Although they are important to regime-complex formation and delimitation, the sites where states negotiate new agreements are rather neglected. We aim to enhance the methodological toolbox available to scholars studying global governance in two ways: (1) by demonstrating how dynamic relationships between states and international organisations (IOs) unfolding within the social space of international treaty negotiations contribute to regime-complex formation; and (2) how social network analysis (SNA) can help us to detect patterns in these relationships. Combining participant observation and collaborative event ethnography (CEE) with social network analysis, we present new empirical material illustrating how we delimited a regime complex and how IOs interact throughout the negotiation process. We applied our methodology to the case of marine-biodiversity governance and use observational data collected during three intergovernmental conferences (IGCs) (2018–19) on a new treaty for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ) for our analysis. We discuss the results in relation to our approach’s strengths and weaknesses and implications for future research on regime complexity.
Journal Article
Renegotiating in good faith: How international treaty revisions can deepen cooperation
International agreements are often understood to help governments make credible commitments to future policy by limiting their ability to renege on their promises. Renegotiations of agreements are accordingly viewed as a threat to cooperation, since renegotiations call past commitments into question. But we know little about the frequency or nature of treaty renegotiations. When are international agreements renegotiated, and what effect does renegotiation have on international cooperation? Do most renegotiations indeed aim to backtrack on past commitments? Using the topical context of the trade regime, I collect new data on international treaty revisions, covering 310 preferential trade agreements signed since the year 2000. Around a quarter of these agreements have been amended in some form, and the supermajority of amendments result not in scaled back agreements, but in deeper commitments. Survival analysis shows that ‘like-minded’ countries with a shared language and similar voting patterns at the UN General Assembly are most likely to revise their commitments. In contrast, I do not find evidence to support the view of PTA revisions as ‘backsliding’ on past commitments. The effects of revisions on trade cooperation support the more cooperative view of revisions. An error-correction model shows revisions are associated with a long-run increase in export volumes. Renegotiations are not breakdowns in international relations, but opportunities for governments to renew their commitment to cooperation.
Journal Article
Decision Maker Preferences for International Legal Cooperation
Why do some decision makers prefer big multilateral agreements while others prefer cooperation in small clubs? Does enforcement encourage or deter institutional cooperation? We use experiments drawn from behavioral economics and cognitive psychology—along with a substantive survey focused on international trade—to illustrate how two behavioral traits (patience and strategic reasoning) of individuals who play key roles in negotiating and ratifying an international treaty shape their preferences for how treaties are designed and whether they are ratified. Patient subjects were more likely to prefer treaties with larger numbers of countries (and larger long-term benefits), as were subjects with the skill to anticipate how others will respond over multiple iterations of strategic games. The presence of an enforcement mechanism increased subjects' willingness to ratify treaties; however, strategic reasoning had double the effect of adding enforcement to a trade agreement: more strategic subjects were particularly likely to favor ratifying the agreement. We report these results for a sample of 509 university students and also show how similar patterns are revealed in a unique sample of ninety-two actual US policy elites. Under some conditions certain types of university student convenience samples can be useful for revealing elite-dominated policy preferences—different types of people in the same situation may prefer to approach decision-making tasks and reason through trade-offs in materially different ways.
Journal Article
Nonstate Actors and Compliance with International Agreements: An Empirical Analysis of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention
International relations scholarship has made great progress on the study of compliance with international agreements. While persuasive, most of this work has focused on states’ de jure compliance decisions, largely excluding the de facto behavior of nonstate actors whose actions the agreement hopes to constrain. Of particular interest has been whether the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention (ABC) might reduce the propensity of multinational corporations (MNCs) to bribe officials in host countries through its mechanisms of extraterritoriality and extensive peer review. Unfortunately, research is hampered by reporting bias. Since the convention raises the probability of investors’ punishment for bribery in their home countries, it reduces both the incentives for bribery and willingness to admit to the activity. This generates uncertainty over which of these incentives drives any correlation between signing the convention and reductions in reported bribery. We address this problem by employing a specialized survey experiment that shields respondents and reduces reporting bias. We find that after the onset of Phase 3 in 2010, when the risk of noncompliance increased for firms subject to the OECD-ABC, those MNCs reduced their actual bribery relative to their nonsignatory competitors.
Journal Article
Democracy and Multilateralism: The Case of Vote Buying in the UN General Assembly
Democracies are more supportive of US positions on important votes in the UN General Assembly than of nondemocracies. Is this because democracies share common perspectives, or does this pattern reflect coercion? Since 1985, US law has stipulated that the US State Department identify important votes and that aid disbursements reflect voting decisions. To unravel these alternative explanations, we introduce a strategic statistical model that allows us to estimate voting preferences, vulnerability to influence, and credibility of linkage, which are theoretical quantities of interest that are not directly observable. The results reject the hypothesis of shared democratic values: poor democracies have voting preferences that are more oppositional to US positions than autocracies, and they are more willing than autocracies to take symbolic stands that may cost them foreign aid. Democracies support US positions, however, because US aid linkages are more credible when directed toward democratic countries. Splitting the sample into Cold War and post–Cold War segments, we find that the end of the Cold War changed the way US linkage strategies treated allies and left- and right-leaning governments, but the effects of democracy remained constant.
Journal Article