Signaling by signature: The weight of international opinion and ratification of treaties by domestic veto players

Hugh-Jones, David ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8360-8884, Milewicz, Karolina and Ward, Hugh (2018) Signaling by signature: The weight of international opinion and ratification of treaties by domestic veto players. Political Science Research and Methods, 6 (1). pp. 15-31. ISSN 2049-8470

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Abstract

The signing of international treaties is usually considered insignificant for international legal cooperation. Accordingly, International Relations theorists have paid it little attention. We show in this paper how and why treaty signature matters for the ultimate decision to ratify an international treaty. We argue that when multiple well-informed actors publicly sign an international treaty, this can provide a strong signal of issue importance to domestic veto players, and in turn may persuade them to ratify the treaty. We formalize this argument in a two-level signaling game, and test it on a data set of 126 international environ- mental agreements. We find that treaties are more likely to be ratified when their signatories include countries with high levels of general or issue-specific knowledge.

Item Type:	Article
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Economics
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Environment, Resources and Conflict Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Centres > Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Sciences Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Behavioural Economics
Depositing User:	Pure Connector
Date Deposited:	20 Apr 2016 13:00
Last Modified:	21 Aug 2023 01:03
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/58325
DOI:	10.1017/psrm.2016.10

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