Abstract
We study the effects of treaty design and domestic institutional hurdles on the ratification behavior of states with respect to multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs). Specifically, we examine whether (1) strong legality mandated by a treaty such as precisely stated obligations, strong monitoring/enforcement mechanisms, and dispute resolution procedures, and (2) high domestic constitutional hurdles such as requirements for explicit legislative approval deter countries from ratifying a treaty. To test our theoretical claim, we use a new time-series-cross-sectional dataset that includes information on the ratification behavior of 162 countries with respect to 220 MEAs in 1950–2000. We find that treaties that are characterized as ‘hard’ indeed deter ratification. Furthermore, explicit legislative approval requiring supermajority also makes treaty ratification less likely.
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Notes
In this paper, we focus only on treaties, which, according to the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, constitute ‘hard’ law. Furthermore, we use the term ‘hard’ treaty to indicate any treaty that imposes well-defined obligations, and create procedures to monitor and enforce these obligations as well as dispute resolution mechanisms; and ‘soft’ treaty to denote any treaty that is deficient in precision of obligations and/or monitoring and enforcement measures, and dispute resolution mechanisms.
Veto players are individuals (president, prime minister) or collective political units (chambers of the legislature, government coalition members, political parties, an independent judiciary) whose approval is necessary for policy change and in our study for the ratification of an international environmental treaty.
The term ‘ratification’ indicates any form of binding commitment (as opposed to signature). Depending on the specific legal context, this commitment can also be expressed by adhesion, accession, etc.
Only in very rare circumstances does a country withdraw from a treaty it has already ratified. If this was the case, the particular country–treaty combination was reintegrated into the dataset.
However, our results are robust to clustering the standard errors by either treaty or treaty–country combination (see online appendix).
Since it is, in some cases, debatable whether a particular treaty is indeed a global environmental treaty, we show in the online appendix that our results do not depend on how one defines a global environmental treaty
The data is taken from Bernauer et al. (2013a). The coding instructions can be found in the online appendix and the dataset is available from the authors.
Although our measure of obligation is quite crude since it only accounts for rule precision rather than substantive commitments in terms of changes in behavior/policy, still we believe that it is able to capture the notion of loss of discretion to act in a self-serving manner and thus loss of sovereignty.
An example for a treaty with monitoring and enforcement provisions is the Kyoto Protocol since it specifies an institutional body to monitor and enforce the goals of the treaty, namely the Subsidiary Body for Implementation.
This variable is coded as one if the treaty text either outlines dispute settlement provisions for the specific treaty of if a third actor is responsible for solving potential disputes.
Our coding procedure follows Abbott et al. (2000) and Abbott and Snidal (2000) work, which distinguishes between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ law according to three dimensions, namely obligation, precision, and delegation, and classifies as ‘soft’ law an agreement in which only one of the three elements is emphasized.
Of course, there exist other options. One option would be to use each characteristic separately as a dummy variable. However, the results then do not capture how a ‘hard’ treaty in general affects the ratification probability, which is what we want to model in this paper. Another option would be to use the sum of the three characteristics. Since the results are identical to the results presented in the paper using the dichotomous measure, we present them in the online appendix (see Table A.3). Finally, and most importantly, the findings are the same if we either use a ‘hard’ treaty measure that takes on the value of one as soon as one of the three characteristics are present or if we use a measure that becomes one only if all three characteristics are present (see table A.5 in the online appendix). These results indicate that the presence of any of the treaty characteristics is enough to deter ratification corroborating thus the findings reported by Bernauer et al. (2013a).
Another possibility would be to code whether none, only the lower, or both houses need to approve a treaty. We show results based on this coding in the online appendix in Table A.13.
To test the robustness of this measure, however, we run our models excluding all transition countries because these countries were the most likely to experience a constitutional reform. The exclusion of the transition countries from the analysis, however, does not alter our main results (see Table A.16 in the online appendix).
Following the literature on the Environmental Kuznets Curve one could expect income to have an inverted U-shaped effect on the likelihood of joining international environmental treaties. However, when we include the squared value of the log of GDP per capita we see that the effect is monotonically increasing with GDP per capita. To keep our model as parsimonious as possible we therefore opted to include only GDP per capita without its square term. Results including the squared term are available upon request.
It would be preferable to use a measure that covers a country’s environmental quality in more general terms. Unfortunately, lack of data in time-series format limits our selection to SO2 emissions. For example, data on water quality exists only from the 1980s onwards whereas composite indices of environmental performance tend to be not comparable over time. Finally, we refrain from using CO2 emissions since CO2 is a global and not a local public good.
Global public good refers to internationally or globally shared natural resources or ecosystems, such as climate change; domestic public good refers to national environmental public goods such as the conservation of domestic wildlife or natural habitats.
We show in the online appendix that this effect is not only due to the US.
It is also important to note that these results are not driven by whether the treaty allows for differentiated obligations for a subset of countries (e.g., lower emission targets for developing countries), see Table A.6. Furthermore, the results do not change if we use several dummy variables to control for treaties dealing with specific issue such as pollution, species, nuclear, and habitat; treaties dealing with agricultural issues serve as the baseline category (see Table A.19).
However, if we look at the percentage change of the odds of observing a positive outcome, the picture changes dramatically. For example, a change from a ‘soft’ to a ‘hard’ treaty decreases the odds of ratifying a given treaty by almost 24 % (see table A.15 in the online appendix).
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Spilker, G., Koubi, V. The effects of treaty legality and domestic institutional hurdles on environmental treaty ratification. Int Environ Agreements 16, 223–238 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10784-014-9255-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10784-014-9255-4