The Life and Death of International Treaties.

The ratification process for international treaties has become increasingly politicized in many democratic states, often pitting domestic actors against one another in intense debates about institutional commitments and sovereignty. But while scholars have devoted attention to the negotiation of international agreements, few have studied ratification struggles that define the ultimate success or failure of international commitments. Fewer still have examined the dynamics of this process in comparative perspective. This paper attempts to fill this gap in the literature by exploring the politics of contemporary international treaty ratification processes across democratic regimes. Drawing on two-level game theory, I posit that successful elite strategies for treaty ratification in democratic states must take into account regime type (which conditions executive-legislative relations), interest group pressure, and public opinion in the domestic political environment relative to international commitments. A structured, focused comparison of case studies is presented to analyze the experiences of the United States, Canada, and Germany in ratification struggles in the past decade. Treaties that have been successfully completed, including the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Treaty on European Union, are compared to high-profile treaty failures such as the United States’ position on the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the Kyoto Protocol. I conclude that the likelihood of successful treaty ratification across issue areas depends primarily upon executive strategies and electoral systems (which condition elite consensus in government). In addition, federalism and factionalism appear to function as important intervening variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]