Wait 'til next year? The politics and timing of treaty ratification

Abstract

States spend years and tremendous diplomatic capital negotiating treaties. Yet, despite the best efforts of skilled negotiators, some states wait for months, years, and even decades, to ratify the treaties they took part in negotiating. In this dissertation, I investigate the phenomenon of ratification delay and attempt to provide an explanation for why some states wait to ratify treaties while others do not. In order to build a theory of ratification timing, I recast the two-level game metaphor to account of the strategic behavior of state legislatures and constraints of the ratification process. I test this theory on an original dataset of state ratifications for a specific cluster of treaties: The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and its implementing treaties. My findings indicate that previous studies of ratification have overestimated the importance of the states leaders and underestimated the importance of legislators and the institutional ratification requirements.