Search

This paper proposes that the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its successor, the World Trade Organization (WTO), experienced a deepening/widening tradeoff: as their membership increased (greater width), their effectiveness in promoting trade between members/participants declined (lesser de facto depth). This proposition is tested using gravity models of bilateral trade, first separating the GATT and WTO, which are usually combined into a single variable, and then adding a width variable corresponding to each institution. The results show that (1) both regimes were the deepest, or the most trade effective, when they had the fewest member-states and (2) their trade effectiveness declined, eventually becoming statistically insignificant, as more countries joined. As a quantitative case study, this paper provides some of the first evidence consistent with a tradeoff between depth and width within international institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

States often use reservations to modify their treaty obligations. Prior research demonstrates why states enter reservations and why states object to reservations, but little work explains why states withdraw them. We argue that states withdraw reservations in response to international social pressure. Using novel data on reservations and reservation withdrawals for the nine core international human rights treaties, our analyses reveal two factors that compel states to withdraw reservations: (1) pressure from peer states and (2) pressure from human rights treaty bodies conducting periodic reviews. While previous work emphasizes domestic factors, our research shows that the international community encourages states to withdraw reservations and strengthen their commitments to human rights and international law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent proliferation of Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) in authoritarian regimes is puzzling. While SWFs can generate political, financial, and geopolitical benefits in the long-term, their creation also sharply impedes an autocrat's ability to fund current patronage and other regime-stabilizing public and private goods. What explains the creation of autocratic SWFs? We argue that sovereign wealth funds are more likely to emerge when autocratic leaders possess a high degree of policy-making autonomy. Policy-making autonomy allows leaders to override any opposition from regime insiders who might prefer to keep capital at home and available for patronage. At the same time, such leaders are more politically secure, and thus are more confident that they will remain in power to reap the medium to long-term financial rewards of these funds. We operationalize this concept with indicators that measure whether an autocrat has consolidated their authority over the regime's party infrastructure and employ survival analysis on a global sample of autocratic regimes from 1960–2010. We find robust support for our argument and describe how our findings provide new insights on the political determinants of sovereign wealth funds and the consequences of authoritarian power-sharing institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

States often file reservations to human rights treaties with the goal of reducing their legal commitments under the treaty. Other states within the treaty have the right to declare objections in response to states making reservations. This is a potentially powerful tool for objecting states, and has numerous consequences for relations within and outside the human rights institution. So why do only some states lodge formal objections, while others do not? We argue that states consider the degree of social power they wield over a reserving state when formulating the decision to lodge an objection, because higher levels of social power amplify the effects of an objection. To evaluate our expectation, we gather data on all states' reserving and objecting behaviors within the Convention against Torture. Controlling for a number of factors, we find that the measure of social power significantly increases the likelihood that a state will object to another state's reservation. This research calls attention to the power of objections as a legal tool, and suggests areas of future research for the effects of objections on the legality of human rights agreements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]