Why Do Countries Participate in Global Environmental Agreements?

The failure of US Congress to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on climate change mitigation has led to renewed scholarly interest in the conditions under which states join international agreements, and in particular multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs). We study the effects of two key factors, namely treaty design and domestic legislative hurdles, on the ratification behavior of states with respect to MEAs. Specifically, we are interested in whether (1) strong legalization mandated by a treaty such as demanding obligations, and strong monitoring and enforcement mechanisms, and (2) high domestic institutional hurdles such as requirements for explicit legislative approval and constraints on executive power deter countries from ratifying a treaty. To test our theoretical claim we use a new time-series-cross-sectional dataset that includes information on the ratification behavior of 164 countries with respect to 314 MEAs in 1950 - 2000. We find that treaties that can be characterized as hard law indeed deter ratification. Furthermore, explicit legislative approval requiring supermajority also makes ratification less likely. In contrast to our theoretical expectations countries with a higher number of veto players are more likely to ratify environmental treaties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]