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State power and diffusion processes in the ratification of global environmental treaties, 1981–2008

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Abstract

There have been many explanations for why countries ratify global environmental treaties. They range from neorealist theory, to hegemony theory, world society theory, and network embeddedness theory. Drawing on hegemonic transition theory, this paper provides evidence that prior to the fall of the Soviet Union, strong and weak countries ratified a treaty if the USA or the USSR ratified the treaty first. After the fall of the Soviet Union, countries’ proximity to world society institutions increased the likelihood of ratifying a treaty, and only weaker countries emulated the ratifications of the USA and Russia. However, weaker countries also emulated economic, religious, and language peers, diplomatic ties, and neighbors as well. In contrast, more powerful countries ratified treaties more independently. We studied the ratifications of eight universal environmental treaties by 166 countries between 1981 and 2008 and showed that as the geopolitical context changed, the diffusion process changed. The paper argues that the hegemonic transition which took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s was an enabling event that helped to explain the new roles that major powers assumed in the 1990s and 2000s and opened the door to the ascendency of global institutions and broader participation in the environmental regime.

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Notes

  1. By unstable we mean countries that through the 1990s and 2000s either experienced extreme domestic conflict or were isolated from the rest of the world. The countries included: Afghanistan, Cyprus, Iraq, Kosovo, Liberia, Montenegro, North Korea, Serbia, Somalia, South Sudan, Timor-Leste. Our reason for excluding these countries was that they did not have stable governments that could engage other countries in efforts to address global welfare problems.

  2. The US Central Intelligence Agency, The World Factbook. Countries’ Independence Dates (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2088.html).

  3. Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and West Germany were not in our data set, although they existed as countries in the 1980s. Germany entered the data set in 1991 after the merger of East and West Germany.

  4. The Polity IV Project offers an alternative measure of autocracy/democracy. We used the Freedom House measure, because it and measures devised by Raymond Gastil were used in previous studies of countries’ environmental policies and policy-related behaviors (see Congleton 1992; Murdoch and Sandler 1997; Fredriksson and Gaston 2000; Neumayer 2002; Fredriksson et al. 2007; Fredriksson and Wollscheid 2007; Bättig and Bernaurer 2009; Bernauer et al 2010).

  5. Because many countries were under the umbrella of the former Soviet Union in the 1980s, they did not have Freedom House data for that period. In fact, the Soviet Union was not coded in that decade. We also discovered that there were missing data on the Soviet Union for industrial output as a percent of GDP for 1980 through 1988. We addressed these problems using the multiple imputation approach which is described below.

  6. There are other measures of power using relational or network data (Hafner-Burton et al. 2009), structural capabilities (Volgy and Bailin 2003), involvement in the world beyond their region (Volgy et al. 2011), and technological capabilities. Researchers have also questioned the validity of the CINC (Kadera and Sorokin 2004). Nonetheless, we decided on the CINC, because it is the most common indicator of state power (e.g., Gunitsky 2014), missing data are minimal for the period we study, and we do not use it as a tool to describe transitions or dyadic power relationships. However, we are aware of changing composition especially around 1993 when many former Soviet satellites joined the list of countries.

  7. This implies that countries like Japan, China, India, Greece, Poland, Viet Nam and others which have languages other than these eight are coded as having no language peers.

  8. It is important that the choices are truly independent and that the same social processes are at work in explaining choices across treaties. We addressed these issues by selecting treaties that addressed different environmental problems and which were not linked in any way. Also we included dummy variables for each treaty to control for whatever was unique about the treaty. Next, we computed the proportion of treaties which a country had previously ratified. This variable has substantive meaning, but it also controls for the propensity of any one country to ratify a treaty. Finally, we computed the number of years since a country last ratified a treaty. We reran the analysis including this variable, but this did not produce substantively different results, so we did not include the results in the paper. They are available upon request.

  9. This was in response to Fujimoto et al. (2011) who suggested that analysts include the number or count of events which countries participate in (in our case languages or IGOs) to reduce the negative bias in the network autocorrelation effect as the density of the network increases.

  10. The method for multiple imputing the data set was developed by Rubin (1987). We chose the joint modeling through the multivariate normal methodology (JM: MVN). We use Amelia II (version 1.7.2), a general-purpose multiple imputation package of R which is based on the joint modeling through the multivariate normal methodology. The Amelia program is developed by Honaker et al. (1998–2002). Amelia II integrates the Expectation–Maximization algorithm with Bootstrapping (EMB). We choose Amelia II because our data set is a panel of a large number of countries, which requires algorithms that can control for a time trend during imputation. We include all the variables in the model. Before imputation, we normalized skewed variables by log, square, square root, and other transformations.

  11. The proportions are based on the number of countries in existence at the time. See Appendix II (online) for the countries included in our analysis and when they entered our data set.

  12. The average VIFs for the seven models ranged from 3.96 to 4.11; the maximum scores for individual variables were between 12.96 and 12.99.

  13. Multicollinearity was less a problem here. The average VIFs for the seven models ranged from 2.82 to 2.88: the maximum scores for individual variables were between 8.05 and 8.06.

  14. It is important to remember that the social influence and CINC scores were converted to standard scores before computing the product terms.

  15. Their list is very similar to Volgy et al.’s (2011) list. The only difference is that the COW data set has China as a major power since 1950, while Volgy et al. (2011) codes it as a major power after 1990 similar to Japan and Germany. Comparing these countries with those that were ranked as the most powerful using CINC scores, all seven countries were included in the 1980, 1985, and 1990 top ten (along with India, Brazil, and Italy) and in the 1995, 2000, and 2005 top ten (along with India, Korea, and Brazil).

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Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the Climate Risk Assessment Research Project at the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Tsukuba, Japan for providing funding for this research, the International Studies Program at the University of Arizona for travel funds, and the Fulbright Program which enabled the third author to teach and do research at the University of Tsukuba in 2007. Finally, thanks to Thomas J. Volgy, Gary Goertz, Noah Friedkin, Eugene Johnsen, Scott Eliason, Robert Pekkanen, Scott Savage, Daisuke Murakami, Hajime Seya, and several graduate students in the Sociology Department at Arizona for their help with this paper.

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  1. Center for Global Environmental Research, National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba, Japan

    Yoshiki Yamagata & Jue Yang

  2. Fujitsu Research Institute, Tokyo, Japan

    Jue Yang

  3. School of Sociology, The University of Arizona, Social Science, Room 400, Tucson, AZ, 85721, USA

    Joseph Galaskiewicz

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  1. Yoshiki Yamagata
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Yamagata, Y., Yang, J. & Galaskiewicz, J. State power and diffusion processes in the ratification of global environmental treaties, 1981–2008. Int Environ Agreements 17, 501–529 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10784-016-9332-y

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