Abstract
Is there a strategically beneficial time for political leaders to make international environmental commitments? Based on the political cycles theory, we argue that leaders have incentives to delay costly ratification of international environmental agreements to the post-electoral period. However, the cost of participating in these agreements is often lower for developing countries, and they may enjoy indirect advantages, which may make them more prone to ratifying in the pre-electoral period. These hypotheses are assessed empirically by studying the ratification process of 41 global environmental agreements censused in the Environmental Treaties and Resources Indicators’ database from 1976 to 1999. We use a duration model in which time is measured on a daily basis, enabling us to precisely identify pre- and post-electoral periods—a significant challenge in political cycles studies. Our investigation reveals the existence of political ratification cycles that are of substantial magnitude and non-linear over the pre- and post-electoral years.
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Notes
While no influence of foreign peers is observed by Beron et al. (2003) in the Montreal Protocol ratification process, Murdoch et al. (2003) find that a country is positively influenced by its polluting neighbors in the case of the Helsinki Protocol. In a study of 255 IEAs, Bernauer et al. (2010) find evidence that the ratification of countries from the same region increases the probability of ratifying an IEA. Finally, Sauquet (2014) highlights that, for the case of the Kyoto Protocol, countries are positively influenced by their trade and investment partners.
Citizen preferences have been shown to be related to a country’s development level and its number of green NGOs (Fredriksson et al. 2007). In addition, the possibility of expressing preferences is determined by a country’s democracy level (Congleton 1992; Fredriksson and Gaston 2000; Neumayer 2002a). Furthermore, the obligations contained in an IEA are suspected to constrain the behavior of polluting goods producers. Therefore, participation is expected to be inversely related to the presence of industrial lobbies and (possibly) trade openness, even if supporting evidence is weak (Fredriksson and Gaston 1999; Neumayer 2002b; Fredriksson et al. 2007).
In the specific case of the environment, Ashworth et al. (2006) show that the adoption of environmental taxes is delayed beyond an election year by Flemish municipalities.
Moreover, concerned workers may hold leaders accountable for not having managed to preserve jobs. This can ultimately have a detrimental effect on voter perception of the incumbent’s performance and ability, reducing his or her reelection prospects.
In particular, fishing-related treaties are numerous and fishermen are affected directly by species protection policies, such as restrictions, quotas, and prohibition, or even regulations and norms regarding nets or vessels.
However, List and Sturm (2006) compare the behavior of U.S. leaders during their tenure, depending on whether they can be reelected or not. Here, the setting is different. For instance, a number of developing countries’ binding term limits are not credible and have not been respected by incumbents, making their theoretical framework not applicable in our context.
The literature often refers to “vote-trading”, describing a transaction involving a vote. In our case there is no vote directly at stake but rather agreement ratification and international cooperation.
The Environmental Treaties and Resources Indicators database is provided by the joint efforts of SEDAC (NASA) and CIESIN (Columbia University), with contributions by IUCN and UNEP, among others. The advantage of using the ENTRI database is that it is built on several existing sources of information and contains a large set of information concerning these treaties, which was not available in alternative databases.
On numerous occasions amendments are not subject to explicit ratification. Rather, they must be denounced before a specific deadline if a country does not want to be bound to them, as with the examples presented in Descamps et al. (2008). The ratification date for an amendment provided by the ENTRI database is the aforementioned specific deadline, which is common to all countries. In that case there would be no point in studying if the “ratification date” is influenced by the electoral agenda of countries.
A list providing each treaty name, along with its year of entry into force and the number of countries from our sample that had (already) ratified it as of 1999 can be found in Online Appendix A, available at http://tinyurl.com/osbt7hz.
This methodological approach is standard in the literature (Shi and Svensson 2006; Brender and Drazen 2013, for instance). Regime information is extracted from the “System” variable in the DPI. We classify mixed and parliamentary regimes together, as they are not characterized by a strong separation between executive and legislative powers, as opposed to countries with presidential systems (Persson and Tabellini 2003).
Countries are classified according to their status during the majority of the period.
A list of countries along with their respective political regime, is provided in Online Appendix B, available at http://tinyurl.com/osbt7hz. Some countries are obviously democratic only during subperiods and so enter the study only during these subperiods.
In “coxme,” the R routine used to estimate our model, the frailties are estimated using penalized likelihoods for ease of computation. See Therneau et al. (2003) for more details. Frailties are preferred to individual dummies since Allison (2002) and Greene (2004) show that the latter can bias the estimator.
Revenue and trade openness measures are taken from the World Bank Development Indicators database. The democracy level is taken from Polity IV.
We deliberately limit our set of control variables for several reasons. First, few variables in the literature are found to be robust in explaining environmental cooperation. Second, an additional variable should be chosen very carefully, since our model may be severely biased by missing observations, especially if they match the ratification year. Finally, as election dates mostly are exogenous, omitted variable bias is a limited concern. Nevertheless, we examine this issue in Sect. 5.2.
Indeed, election dates are available only from 1975, so to determine whether or not the period under study is post-electoral, the analysis must start on January 1, 1976.
Note that if a country deposes withdrawal or succession instruments, the country-treaty pair is excluded from the analysis.
For instance, Barack Obama was elected for the first time on November 4, 2008 but took office only 11 weeks later, on January 20, 2009.
To clearly demonstrate the implications for the construction of the database and to allow for a better understanding of our empirical contribution, we have developed an example in Online Appendix C, available at http://tinyurl.com/osbt7hz.
For brevity, we present results only from the full model, taking into account both country and treaty heterogeneity that we believe to be more conservative and rigorous. Not controlling for these heterogeneities does not, however, affect our results qualitatively (available columns (1) and (2) in Table D.1 of Online Appendix D, available at http://tinyurl.com/osbt7hz).
Furthermore, note that excluding neither control variables nor the freshest treaties open to ratification in the sample significantly affects our results (columns (3) and (4) in Table D.1 of Online Appendix D).
That is to say, cases in which leaders may have real incentives to behave strategically and, therefore, for which our theoretical mechanisms actually are relevant (as in Brender and Drazen 2005).
When developing this classification, the author was interested in the ratification of Human Rights agreements. However, after looking at excerpts from countries’ constitutions used by Beth Simmons to justify her classification, we consider this classification to be a good proxy for the case of IEAs.
Interested readers may find more details in Appendix 3.2 (Ratification rules) of Beth Simmons’s book.
Countries scoring 1.5 follow a “rule or tradition of informing the legislative body of signed treaties”. Even if legislative assent is not requested, the body that has more influence on this decision may be ambiguous. Moreover, as most countries concerned by this issue are parliamentary (Australia, Botswana, Canada, Egypt, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom, but not Malawi or Peru), legislative power is likely to exert substantive control over the chief executive it has elected or appointed. However, classifying these countries in one of the two groups does not affect the main results (columns (1) and (2) in Table D.2 of Online Appendix D).
Growth rates are extracted from the World Bank Development Indicators database.
This mechanism is well-illustrated by the New Zealand Government’s ratification of the Kyoto Protocol (Yang 2004) which took place after the 2002 election, won by the pro-ratification labour-led party, which the conservative party had opposed.
To do so, we use election dates to delimitate mandates and the variable “PRTYIN” from DPI, which measures how long the chief executive’s party has been in office, to identify changes in the party in power. An alternative would have been to test whether left-right differences play a significant role. However, Schulze (2014) devoted a paper specifically to this issue and found that partisan differences do not influence significantly decisions to ratify (or not) environmental agreements. We think the underlying argument—that left-wing parties are more environmentally-friendly—is questionable. In addition, implementing such an analysis encounters several technical issues, including: relevance of a right/left classification for the case of developing countries, difficulty classifying center parties, and lack of data for many developing countries.
However, interpretation of the coefficient associated with the “Post_S2*Newparty” is subject to caution. Indeed, in that case, the marginal impact is not given by the coefficient associated with interacted terms (Ai and Norton 2003; Brambor et al. 2005). Ai and Norton (2003) developed the methodology for interpreting this coefficient in the cases of logit and probit models only. Yet, the behavior of newly elected parties is a secondary result for us and it is not the purpose of this paper to extend Ai and Norton’s methodology for the case of duration models.
Yet, this result has to be taken with caution, due to the aforementioned difficulty of interpreting coefficients associated with interacted variables in duration models (see footnote 32).
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Acknowledgments
We are indebted to the Editor in Chief of this journal, William F. Shughart II, for his valuable comments. We would also like to thank Beth Simmons, Friedrich Schneider, Christian de Perthuis, Per Fredriksson, Simon Dietz, Alain Trannoy, Anne Viallefont, Laurent Wagner, Samuel Guérineau, and Marielle Brunette, as well as the participants of the 2014 ADRES conference, the 2013 EPCS, EAERE, AFSE annual meeting, the 2012 ENRMDTE conference, and the participants of the Laboratory of Economic Forestry, CERDI, and Climate Economic Chair seminars for their insightful comments. This paper benefited from the financial support of the FERDI (Fondation pour les Etudes et Recherches sur le Développement International) and of the program “Investissement d’Avenir” (reference ANR-10-LABX-14-01) of the French government. Alexandre Sauquet would also like to thank the “Conseil Regional d’Auvergne” for its financial support. The usual disclaimers apply.
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Cazals, A., Sauquet, A. How do elections affect international cooperation? Evidence from environmental treaty participation. Public Choice 162, 263–285 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-014-0221-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-014-0221-z