Do Treaties Constrain or Screen? Selection Bias and Treaty Compliance

Stein, Jana von

doi:10.1017/s0003055405051919

Cited by 356 publications

(172 citation statements)

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“…Absent participation enforcement, countries should only agree to become signatories if they expect that they will be able to comply with their commitments (Downs et al 1996;von Stein 2005). If complying is prohibitively costly, and if the IEA does not enforce participation, it seems reasonable to expect that countries would decline to ratify the IEA.…”

Section: What Characterizes Potent Enforcement?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The political feasibility of potent enforcement in a post-Kyoto climate agreement

Aakre

2014

Int Environ Agreements

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To be effective, a post-Kyoto climate agreement must secure significant greenhouse gas emissions reductions by all (key) emitters. Potent participation and compliance enforcement will be required to make it in every key emitter's best interest to participate in, and comply with, an agreement which specifies deep emissions reductions for all its signatories. This article considers the conditions under which potent enforcement would likely be politically feasible. Based on assessments of the current political landscape, and on the sets of constraints that characterize negotiations over enforcement systems, the article firstly finds that neither type of enforcement would be politically feasible if agreement is sought among all key emitters. Secondly, because participation enforcement is perceived as less legitimate than compliance enforcement, the coalition of countries prepared to accept the former is likely smaller than the coalition prepared to accept the latter. Thirdly, participation enforcement likely places stricter requirements on the coalition's membership and size. Thus, while compliance enforcement should in principle always be politically feasible among some coalition, reaching agreement on participation enforcement is less likely. To the extent that participation enforcement is politically feasible, however, an agreement which enforces the cooperation of all key emitters may be attainable.

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Section: What Characterizes Potent Enforcement?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The political feasibility of potent enforcement in a post-Kyoto climate agreement

Aakre

2014

Int Environ Agreements

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“…Ratification is quite obviously not random either. Methods exist to address endogeneity and selection, but they involve trade-offs and are highly imperfect (Simmons & Hopkins 2005;von Stein 2005).…”

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confidence: 99%

Treaty Compliance and Violation

Simmons

2010

Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci.

217

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International law has enjoyed a recent renaissance as an important subfield of study within international relations. Two trends are evident in the recent literature. First, the obsession with theoretical labels is on the decline. Second, empirical, especially quantitative, work is burgeoning. This article reviews the literature in four issues areas—security, war, and peace; international trade; protection of the environment; and human rights—and concludes we have a much stronger basis for assessing claims about compliance and violation now than was the case only a few years ago. Still, the literature suffers from a few weaknesses, including problems of selection and endogeneity of treaties themselves and an enduring state-centric focus, despite the fact that researchers recognize that nonstate and substate actors influence treaty behavior. Nonetheless, the quality and quantity of new work demonstrates that international law has regained an important place in the study of international politics.

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“…In a followup study, von Stein (2005) argues that screening effects, rather than constraining effects, could easily account for Simmons' results-that is, that states preferentially opt in to treaties with which they are already willing to comply. She also underscores the endogeneity of Article VIII status and argues that unmeasured confounders-that is, variables that have an impact both on commitment and compliance-are potentially problematic for Simmons' results.…”

Section: The Impact Of International Institutionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Carrubba, Yuen and Zorn 2007), selection bias (Sartori, 2003;von Stein, 2005;Boehmke, Morey and Shannon, 2006;Chiba, Martin and Stevenson, 2014), split-population or partial-observability models (Xiang, 2010;Braumoeller and Carson, 2011), zero-inflated or rare events data (King and Zeng, 2001;Bagozzi, Hill, Moore and Mukherjee, 2015), network analysis (Dorussen and Ward, 2008;Hafner-Burton and Kahler, 2009;Maoz, 2009;Cranmer, Desmarais and Menninga, 2012), and more.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Flexible Causal Inference for Political Science

Braumoeller¹,

Marra

Radice

et al. 2018

Polit. Anal.

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Measuring the causal impact of state behavior on outcomes is one of the biggest methodological challenges in the field of political science, for two reasons: behavior is generally endogenous, and the threat of unobserved variables that confound the relationship between behavior and outcomes is pervasive. Matching methods, widely considered to be the state of the art in causal inference in political science, are generally ill-suited to inference in the presence of unobserved confounders.Heckman-style multiple-equation models offer a solution to this problem; however, they rely on functional form assumptions that can produce substantial bias in estimates of average treatment effects. We describe a category of models, flexible simultaneous likelihood models, that account for both features of the data while avoiding reliance on rigid functional form assumptions. We then assess these models' performance in a series of neutral simulations, in which they produce substantial (55% to >90%) reduction in bias relative to competing models. Finally, we demonstrate their utility in a reanalysis of Simmons' (2000) classic study of the impact of Article VIII commitment on compliance with the IMF's currency-restriction regime.

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Do Treaties Constrain or Screen? Selection Bias and Treaty Compliance

Cited by 356 publications

References 20 publications

The political feasibility of potent enforcement in a post-Kyoto climate agreement

The political feasibility of potent enforcement in a post-Kyoto climate agreement

Treaty Compliance and Violation

Flexible Causal Inference for Political Science

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