15 November 2008 The Evolution of Global Environmental Commitments Thomas Bernauer, Anna Kalbhenn, Vally Koubi, Gabi Ruoff International Political Economy Society Conference Philadelphia,

15 November /12 Research Question  To what extent is the evolution of global environmental commitments influenced by  Globalization  Contingency effects  Domestic factors?  Spatial and temporal dynamics of international cooperation

15 November /12 Theoretical Framework  Economic Integration: Trade Openness  The more open a country, the greater the loss from a reduction in trade  Environmental regulation (like a tax on exports) increases the costs of exportables  The probability of ratification decreases

15 November /12 Theoretical Framework  Political Integration: Membership in International Organizations  Countries that are “entangled” in a larger network of international cooperation are more likely to behave cooperatively in the realm of environmental politics too  The probability of ratification increases

15 November /12 Theoretical Framework  Contingency Effects  Countries are more likely to ratify if other countries, especially those in their “peer group”, have done so -Number of countries ratified -Number of countries in the same region -Number of countries in the same income bracket -Pivotal countries

15 November /12 Theoretical Framework  Domestic Factors: Democracy  Demand Side: -Democracies tend to have higher civil liberties -better informed citizens can push governments and impose higher audience costs, hence likelihood of ratification increases  Supply Side: -According to median voter argument, democratic governments (=better providers of public goods) are expected to ratify global environmental treaties more often than autocracies -According to political myopia argument, democratic leaders (=interested in re-election) should be reluctant to ratify  ambiguous effect on ratification

15 November /12 Theoretical Framework  Domestic Factors: Income  Non-linear effect (inverted U-shaped) between income and likelihood of ratification  Controls:  Power  Environmental stringency  Age of treaty  Geographic region

15 November /12 Research Design  New dataset global environmental treaty ratifications  Time period  Unit of analysis: country-treaty-year -Country-treaty pair in dataset from treaty existence until ratification by respective country  Binary-time-series-cross-sectional approach with cubic time polynomial to approximate hazard (Carter and Signorino 2008)

15 November /12 Results BTSCS logit regressions, robust standard errors in parentheses,clustered by country; *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1

15 November /12 Simulated Probabilities Baseline Model

15 November /12 Approximation baseline hazard

15 November /12 Conclusions  Trade has indeed a negative effect  Democracy: only weak, though positive effect  results driven by civil liberties  IGO membership and contingency variables increase likelihood of treaty ratification  contingency effects stronger than country-specific effects