An opportunity cost theory of US treaty behavior*
Judith Kelley and Jon Pevehouse
DRAFT
Version 1.9.4
* We thank Kathryn Chylla, Frank Halloran at the US State Department, John Gamble for sharing his
data with us, and participants at the November 6, 2010 Duke-Harvard Foreign Relations Workshop, "The
Political Economy of U.S. Foreign Relations Law,” Duke University. We also received helpful comments
from participants at seminars at Georgetown University and Florida State University.
An opportunity cost theory of US treaty behavior
What factors influence whether the US participates in global treaty-based cooperation? Traditional
explanations hold that as long as two-thirds of senators are convinced that the benefits of the treaty
outweigh the costs, the US should participate in the treaty. However, at times the US fails to join treaties
that appear to have the support of 2/3 of senators, or even quite uncontroversial treaties. This has long
ago earned the senate a reputation as “the graveyard of treaties.” To understand what other factors may
explain such outcomes, we examine the behavior of both the president and the senate on treaties that
require advice and consent. We argue that the constitutional advice and consent process imposes
opportunity costs for both the president and the senate in terms of senate floor time, and that these costs
slow down the process significantly or even block it completely. In a statistical analysis of all
multilateral treaties signed since 1967 we find evidence that shows not only that traditional political and
treaty-specific factors influence a treaty’s success in the senate, but also that previously overlooked
institutional factors play an additional role in the fate of US treaty participation. This means that the
president and the senate do not simply consider each treaty on its own merits; rather treaties may be
sidelined due to political costs associated with dealing with them.
Introduction
The US Senate can be quite speedy at ratifying treaties. Thus, in March 2003, the US signed the NATO
protocols to enable the accession of several new members. By April the president had sent the treaty to
the senate and by May the senate provided its advice and consent. However, such speed is rare. For
example, also in 2003, the World Health Organization concluded the Framework Convention on Tobacco
Control (FCTC) and the United States signed the treaty. Then Senator Barack Obama, a long time tobacco
control advocate also fighting personal tobacco addiction, joined in a letter urging President George W.
Bush to the send the FCTC to the senate for ratification. Now President Barack Obama has now been
president for three years. Why then has he failed to transmit the treaty?
Similarly, in 1994, President Clinton transmitted the Law of the Sea and the Agreement on Part XI to the
Senate. Since then, the Law of the Sea has been on the Treaty Priority List1 of Presidents Clinton, Bush,
and Obama. Moreover, it has had the support of over two-thirds of the Senate.2 Why then has it
remained unperfected? Why do some treaties remain on the president’s desk or remain tabled in the
Senate despite strong incentives to ratify the treaty?
In this paper, we formulate an answer to these questions. The main question is: Once the United States
has signed an international agreement that requires Senate advice and consent, what explains how long
the president takes to transmit it to the Senate, and if he does transmit it, what explains how long the
Senate takes to bring it to a vote or whether the Senate ever gives it advice and consent at all?
Legal scholars have increasing pointed to the senate’s failure to ratify treaties, yet scholars have not
explained why the senate fails so often. Although there has been some analysis of the Senate advice and
consent process for presidential nominations (McCarty and Razaghian 1999 ; Binder and Maltzman 2002
; Derouen, Peake et al. 2005), scholars have paid very little attention to the US treaty advice and consent
process. We know of only one broad and systematic examination of the US treaty process across treaties
1 Administrations have begun to issue “treaty priority list” for each new Congress. These typically list (1) treaties
currently on the Committee's calendar on which the Administration supports Senate action at this time, (2) treaties
currently on the Committee's calendar on which the Administration does not support Senate action at this time, and
(3) treaties not yet before the Committee on which the Administration is actively reviewing treaty transmittal
packages with a view toward Senate action prior to adjournment of the Congress. For an example, see
http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/116355.pdf and
http://globalsolutions.org/files/general/White_House_Priorities_List.pdf
2 http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2009/05/07/07greenwire-sen-kerry-looks-for-window-to-ratify-law-of-th12208.html
and time (Krutz and Peake 2009), one study of determinants of treaty reservations attached by the Senate
(Auerswald and Maltzman 2003), and a few analyses of security treaties (Krepon and Caldwell 1991 ;
Delaet and Scott 2006), or case studies of individual treaties (Evans and Oleszek 2003).3 There has been
more attention to what determines whether the US administration treats a particular international
agreement as an executive agreement or as a treaty that requires senate advice and consent (Martin 2005 ;
Krutz and Peake 2009), than to the advice and consent process itself.
Yet, the senate advice and consent process for treaties is important for several reasons. First, the treaties
that the administration determines requires senate advice and consent tend to be, by constitutional design,
matters of significant US commitments, sometimes involving delegation of significant authority or
resources. Second, whether the senate provides advice and consent, and whether the US ultimately ratifies
treaties influences how the US participates in international cooperation. For example, sometimes lack of
advice and consent, and the subsequent delay in US delays treaty ratification prevents the US from
participating fully in the organizational work that flows from the treaty. For example, the US may be
relegated to observer status, despite actively cooperating with the treaty organization, a point the president
sometimes bemoans in his transmittal letters to the senate.4 Furthermore, given its global leadership role,
US participation can be pivotal in whether international cooperation on a particular issue succeeds. In
cases such as the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, the absence of senate advice and consent may
diminish global efforts to cooperate on important issues, thus having important effects not only for the US
but for other states as well.
Lastly, during negotiations of a treaty, when other states surmise that the US will not ultimately join the
treaty regime, the US loses influence over the negotiations (Galbraith 2012). This in turn further
diminishes the likelihood that the US will join the treaty and thus bolsters even further skepticism about
US good faith during treaty negotiation. A former Legal Advisor to the State Department stressed this as a
big problem for US negotiators, because “It may well be that we will sign the treaty, but our negotiating
partners have no confidence that the executive branch will necessarily be able to get a potentially
controversial treaty through the Senate (Johnson 2010).” Note that this dynamic also is contradictory to
existing international relations theory: two-level games literature traditionally suggests that domestic
ratification difficulties can grant international negotiators leverage in negotiation (Putnam 1988). Thus,
treaties requiring senate advice and consent represent a particularly interesting body of international
3 Note that there has been more emphasis on whether the president seeks to evade the senate advice and consent
process through use of executive agreements, a debate we set aside for now, but see our discussion under data
clarifying our sample identification process. (Martin 2005 ; Krutz and Peake 2009)
4 See for example President Bill Clinton’s Message Letter of Transmittal accompanying the South Pacific Regional
Environment Programme Agreement. Treaty Doc. 105-32, November 7, 1997, in which the submittal letter from the
State Department, which the president sends to the senate along with the president’s own message of transmittal,
notes that lack of US ratification will leave the United States without influence on important committees within the
treaty organization.
agreements and it is important to understand how the Senate advice and consent process influences the
US ability to cooperate with other nations.
Traditional national interest arguments
In the international relations theory, most existing analysis of treaty ratification is cross-national and
treats states as rational, unitary actors. Indeed, nearly all of the analysis of treaty ratification examines
cross-national behavior on a given treaty. Thus, several scholars compare decisions across states for
specific treaties and demonstrate various logics that drive state participation in treaties (Fredriksson 2000
; Moravcsik 2000 ; Simmons 2000 ; Buthe and Milner 2008 ; Simmons 2009). The logic may vary across
issues, but the underlying assumption usually is that states are unitary actors and that they join treaty
regimes that are in their national interest. Sometimes the benefit is a signaling value that states attribute to
joining a treaty even if they have no intent of observing it (Vreeland 2008), but the fact remains that a
state is thought to weigh the pros and cons of the treaty and join if the benefits outweigh the costs. Based
on this logic, if a treaty is in the interest of the US, the US should ratify it. Thus, the US failure to join
various treaties such as the International Criminal Court is explained by the costs to the US of agreeing to
the treaty as exceeding the benefits. That is, existing theory essentially base state decisions to join treaty
regimes as only on how the attributes of the treaty serve the national interest.
However, given this frame of analysis, US behavior on some treaties raises some puzzles. For example,
United States negotiators take treaty negotiations very seriously, often objecting to certain provisions in a
treaty and laboriously influencing the content of the treaty, all of which signals to the other states that this
treaty is important to the US. For example, American efforts to renegotiate Article 11 of the Law of the
Sea relating to deep sea bed mining are a case in point. Why then does the US push hard for certain
provisions during treaty negotiations and then, even when the US manages to obtain nearly all its
demands, fail to ratify the treaty? Sometimes the US even initiates some treaties and shapes their form,
and then fails to ratify them. For example, the US has not joined the ILO Convention (185) on Seafarers’
Identity Documents, which was written in direct response to 9/11 terrorist attacks and aimed to strengthen
port of entry security. The US was the driver behind this convention and the tripartite US delegation voted
unanimously to adopt it in 2003. But the treaty has been held up in the Senate, supposedly due to a visa
provision that runs contrary to some federalism provisions in US immigration law.5 But why would
federalism trump national security? Thus, the strong negotiating behavior of the US signals that several
treaties that the US has not ratified are nonetheless important.
5 President's Committee on the International Labor Organization, Esther Brimmer, Assistant Secretary, Bureau of
International Organization Affairs, Department of Labor, Washington, DC, May 4, 2010
http://www.state.gov/p/io/rm/2010/141482.htm
If theory predicts that countries such as the US should become party to treaties that are in their interests, it
is also a puzzle why the US sometimes participates actively in some treaty regimes, seeking to meet the
requirements and build their organizational structures, but does not ratify the underlying treaty. For
example, the US played a major part in the treaty negations for the Biodiversity Convention and has an
excellent compliance record, but has not ratified the treaty itself. The US likewise participates in research
and development for the Agreement on Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels. President George Bush
Jr. transmitted the treaty to the senate in 2008, 7 years after its conclusion, endorsing it as being fully in
the US interest, yet the treaty lingers in the Senate. Why does the United States actively support the use of
international bodies but then fails to ratify the treaty documents of these bodies?
The US also behaves in other ways that signal that it endorses some treaties that it nonetheless has not
ratified. In trade law and other law, the US will refer to unperfected treaties as precedential for USauthored treaties. For example, although the US has not ratified most ILO Conventions, it is reinforcing
the content of many those unratified conventions in a trade agreement with Peru (Charnovitz 2008
96).Why does the US incorporate into trade agreements various human rights conditions (Hafner-Burton
2009), some of which the US has not ratified and accepted into its own domestic law? This suggests that,
paradoxically, the US is not necessarily opposed to the general content of many of these international
treaties, and indeed that the US is interested in their existence as a source of norm development.
Bringing domestic politics back in: Traditional political economy explanations
As the above examples illustrate, there is clearly more than “state interest” driving US decisions to ratify
treaties. The vagaries of domestic politics certainly play an important role as well. If one envisions the
treaty advice and consent process as similar to the traditional legislative activity of law-making,
scholarship in American politics suggests that partisanship as a major influence on the productivity of
legislatures.
Yet, even traditional understandings of partisanship and domestic politics leave Senate advice and consent
behavior as a puzzle. For example, why do some treaties have 67 votes in support on the senate floor as
well as the support of the president, yet do not get brought up for a vote? The Law of the Sea clearly
meets this threshold. Others appear to have equally strong support. For example, the Rotterdam
Convention and the Stockholm Convention each made it out of committee, but although both Republican
and Democratic foreign relations committee chairs have supported them, recommending their ratification,
they have failed to move forward. Thus, many treaties appear to have broad domestic political support,
signaling that politicians generally assess them as being in the interests of the US, yet they linger.
These international and domestic puzzles motivate this paper. As the cases and examples above illustrate,
even in the best of circumstances when the US appears to favor a treaty, the senate may not give its
advice and consent. Importantly, however, the challenge is not simply to explain senate votes on
providing advice and consent for a treaty. Indeed, only very rarely does a treaty get voted down in the
senate (the last time as the senate rejected a treaty was the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in
1999), so the interesting question to understand how treaties are held up in the Senate advice and consent
process.6 For individual treaties it is often possible to find case studies or information that explain the
obstacles the treaty has faced. The explanations usually revolve around pluralist interest groups politics: a
particular opposition forms around a narrow economic or ideological interest. But aside from repeatedly
turning to ex-post ad-hoc, idiosyncratic explanations of particular treaty failures based in pluralist
arguments, is it possible to understand other domestic determinants of US treaty behavior? Can we
generate a more general theory of the treaty ratification process?
To explain the puzzles, individual case studies make it easily apparent that the unitary actor assumption
applied in most cross-national studies of agreement ratification is wrong: a theory must account for the
interplay between international and domestic institutions. This paper therefore draws on the classic body
of work that recognizes that domestic politics and institutions play an important role in foreign policy
(Allison 1971 ; Stoll 1984 ; Putnam 1988). Key to these arguments about two-level games is that
domestic veto players can credibly threaten to withhold support for ratification (Mansfield, Milner et al.
2005). However, while these insights have been applied to studies of conflict and to general studies of US
foreign policy, they have tended to be quite general. Moreover, many of them have failed to draw from
literature in American politics about what is known concerning the domestic political process. We hope to
combine insights from these areas to yield predictions about how domestic institutions and preferences
within those institutions influence the process of treaty ratification.
Opportunity costs
This paper presents an opportunity cost theory of treaty ratification. We argue that one key to
understanding treaty politics is that the senate agenda is a fixed resource that must be prioritized.
Legislation, including treaty advice and consent, must compete for space on the Presidential and the
senate agenda. Therefore, the treaty advice and consent process has an opportunity costs for which
traditional theories fail to account.
Even non-divisive treaties require some presidential attention to move through the process (Johnson
2010). When prioritizing senate time, senators favor issues that influence their popularity. As is well6 In a similar vein, scholars have chosen to analyze delays in Senate consent on nominations. See (McCarty and
Razaghian 1999 ; Binder and Maltzman 2002 ; Derouen, Peake et al. 2005)
established, politicians strive for reelection (Mayhew 1974). This usually means that senators focus
foremost on domestic politics, which usually drives elections (Abramson, Aldrich et al. 1987). This is not
because the public does not care about international issues. Indeed, the US public tends to care deeply
about foreign policy issues that have direct effects such as war and trade, and as a result, senators also
devote considerable time to these. However, these issues are not typically the topics of treaties submitted
for senate advice and consent. Although security treaties may be related indirectly to war, issues of
specific wars are usually not treaty issues.
Trade agreements can engender considerable domestic debate, as in the case of NAFTA, but such
agreements usually become congressional-executive agreements. This means that they do not require the
support of 2/3 of senators for a traditional advice and consent vote, but instead pass through both the
house and senate like regular legislation. Generally the public has much less interest in other issues
related to treaties. They may hold preferences on a given treaty. For example, the US public has largely
supported the International Criminal Court crated by the Rome Statute. However, confessed support for
the ICC in treaty has not translated into a mobilized voter base for the Rome Statute, and the issue is
therefore not one that Senators consider integral to their re-election.
The implication of this insight is central: the decision to push a treaty through the advice and consent
process may be less about an objective examination of costs and benefits of the treaty (as assumed by
traditional analysis) than about the benefit of spending time on the treaty relative to the benefit of other
possible agenda activity that may produce important domestic legislation such as health care reform, for
example. In other words: senate advice and consent depends on the associated opportunity costs.
So how great is the opportunity cost of treaty ratification in terms of senate time? The total opportunity
cost is a function of two things: the value of senate floor time at any given point and the expected duration
of the advice and consent process. As discussed below, the value of senate time depends on the political
environment. The expected duration of a given process depends on how much debate and opposition the
treaty is expected engender as well as how much legislative activity the treaty requires.
Thus, it is not possible to look at the national interest in ratifying a treaty in isolation from the domestic
agenda and opportunity costs of senate time. Opportunity cost influences the likelihood that the senate
will give its advice and consent for ratification of a treaty. Opportunity cost is a function of two things:
political preferences and agenda space.7
7 Opportunity costs could also be a function of complexity – such as the demand for implementing legislation, but
we do not examine that in this version of the paper.
The expected duration of the advice and consent process
Political preferences and treaty opposition
The Senate rules influence the time a floor debate can take. Decision-making rules, veto points, and
legislative procedures open up the opportunity for small groups of Senators to continue debate nearly
indefinitely (Moravcsik 2005 150-151). This means that a small group of senators can essentially block a
vote although they do not necessarily have sufficient votes to defeat it were it brought to a vote. If they
have the determination to stall on the floor, the threat of this stalling technique raises expected duration
and thus the cost of treaty ratification. Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind) lamented this state of affairs in a
2009 speech to the Washington Foreign Law Society:
“[T]oo often, narrow objections to treaties are allowed to prevent any Senate
consideration. The Senate’s rules allow the Senate to vote to cut off debate on a treaty,
and thereby to ensure that a vote on the treaty may occur. But the Senate’s leadership –
both Democrat and Republican -- has been reluctant to exercise this option in recent
years. Their concern appears to be that doing so would require the Senate to spend too
much time debating particular treaties, to the exclusion of other matters that have greater
domestic political appeal. As a result, the Senate has not held a significant debate on a
treaty since the late 1990s, when the Senate debated and approved the Chemical Weapons
Convention, and debated and rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. In essence,
for more than a decade, treaties have had to meet a standard for Senate approval that
approaches unanimity -- far exceeding the already difficult two-thirds majority
requirement established in the Constitution.”8
How long it might take the Senate to process an advice and consent vote thus depends greatly on the
distribution of preferences in the Senate. The senate rules create veto players whose preferences therefore
end up being very important. This is why Haller and Holden have argued that a supermajority ratification
rule such as the one in the senate increases the bargaining position of a country, but it does so at the cost
of also increasing the risk that a treaty fails to become ratified (Haller and Holden 1997). In an analysis of
ILO convention ratification by 17 countries, Boockmann also found that partisan preferences of
government parties influence ratification probabilities significantly, but only when one considers the
power allocation within the governing body (Boockmann 2006). Thus, a major obstacle to the senate
treaty process is the political opposition to a treaty in the senate (Krutz and Peake 2009).
8 (Lugar 2009)
Of particular importance is the preference of the senate foreign relations chair, because this senator
essentially decides whether a treaty is even brought to the senate floor for a vote. Because all treaties must
be cleared through this Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the chair of that committee is particularly
powerful as a gatekeeper to the advice and consent vote on the senate floor. Although in theory the 67th
senator is the swing voter once a treaty comes to the floor, it is far from obvious who this senator actually
is for any given treaty. The DW-Nominate score used to code the ideology of legislators is based on the
entire portfolio of votes on the floor – votes that are predominantly domestic. Thus, the senator designated
the 67th senator by the DW-Nominate measure, is highly unlikely to indeed play the pivotal role in all, if
any, treaty debates. Furthermore, although the position of the Senate Foreign Relations Chair correlates
fairly highly (r = 0.6) with the preferences of the 67th senator, the political preferences of these two
positions could be quite different.
Indeed, the chair tends to be more extreme than the 67th senator. That is: Republican senates will choose a
very conservative senate foreign relations chair and Democratic senate will chose a very liberal one.
Therefore, the senate foreign relations chair effectively imposes a stronger constraint on the advice and
consent process than the senator whose nominate score is the 67th most conservative overall in that
session. Thus, from a theoretical perspective, it is most important to use the political preferences of the
senate foreign relations chair.
Based on the opportunity cost theory, the general expectation is that the more opposed senate veto players
are to a treaty, the longer the senate advice and consent process will take. Whereas it is not possible to
measure relative preferences on each and every theory for all senators, this expectation does lead to other
observable outcomes. As a matter of general expectation, Republican politicians should be expected to be
more opposed to treaty commitments. Republican Senators traditionally stress sovereignty and
conservative morals, both of which are elements that are at times seen as threatened by multilateral
agreements. Past work suggests that Republicans are more reluctant to support arms treaties, for example
(Krepon and Caldwell 1991 ; Delaet and Scott 2006). Scholars have also found that “conservative Senates
and pivotal senators systematically exploit the right to add reservations” (Auerswald and Maltzman 2003
1097), suggesting that conservative Senators are more cautious of offering their advice and consent.
Thus, based on the above, we have the following expectation:
P1: the more conservative the SFRC chair, the longer the advice and consent process will take
Of course, it could be that even without a particularly conservative SFRC chair, a large number of
Republicans in the Senate could create a logjam for treaty ratification. To this end, we also expect that:
P1alternate: the more conservative the pivotal 2/3 Senator, the longer the advice and consent process
will take
Implementation costs
Another observable implication of the theory pertains to implementing legislation. Even if a treaty is not
particularly controversial,9 it may still be time consuming to obtain advice and consent if a treaty requires
implementing legislation, as many treaties that are not self-executing do. The president often states in the
transmittal letter whether the treaty requires implementing legislation, and such requirements will demand
that the senate spends additional time on the implementing legislation. In a busy senate, our opportunity
cost theory would therefore expect requirements for implementing legislation to impose additional delays
or cause the treaty to be set aside.
Px: Treaties that require implementing legislation will take longer to receive Senate advice and consent.
The value of senate floor space
The previous discussion focused on one part of the expected opportunity cost equation, namely how much
time the senate needs to spend on a given treaty. However, the other essential part of the expected
opportunity cost equation pertains to the value of senate floor time at any given point. Because treaty
ratification competes with domestic legislation for senate floor time, we hypothesize that the opportunity
structure of the domestic agenda matters for whether the senate spends time on treaties and subsequently
how long a treaty is likely to sit in the senate or whether the president may hold off entirely on its
transmittal. Time is always scarce in the legislative branch (Hall 1996), but we contend that it is
sometimes scarcer than at other times. From the perspective of the opportunity cost theory, this means
that when the domestic agenda is full and the senate is busy passing legislation, time is costlier.
P2: The more legislation the Senate is passing, the less time it will have for treaties, and the longer treaty
ratification will take.
However, all domestic legislation is not all equally valuable to pass. When the president commands
support in the senate, the chances of passing valuable legislation is higher (McCubbins and Cox 1993). In
other words, when the president commands support in the senate, there is a surplus of political capital and
thus opportunity to move valuable legislation on the political agenda and the calendar of the senate. This
boon of political capital raises the opportunity cost of the senate agenda time.
Thus, the greater support the president has in the senate, the slower treaty ratification should be. Note that
this expectation is contrary to standard expectation that because it is easier to get treaties through the
senate when the president has senate support, treaties should be faster the more support the president has
(for a related logic regarding use of force, see (Howell and Pevehouse 2005); on trade policy, see
(Lohmann and O'Halloran 1994)). On the contrary, we argue that when the president’s support is greater,
the opportunity cost of senate time is also greater, and that this will detract from the incentive to spend
time on treaties, even if they could possibly pass more easily.
P3: The greater support the president has in the senate, the greater value of senate time for domestic
legislation and therefore the longer treaty ratification will take.
In election years, but particularly in presidential election years, domestic legislation becomes too
contentious to pass, particularly as the election grows nearer. Indeed, it is expected that as the election
season begins, the president and Congress do not want to take major policy positions that could upset the
electorate in the home district.10 This lowers the cost of senate time. This is especially true when the
president is not up for reelection, because the Senate is considered rather powerless to enact domestic
legislation at that time. Thus, calendar time becomes more plentiful.
P4a: In presidential election years, and especially during lame-duck years, treaty ratification will be
faster.
P4b: The senate is more likely to spend time on the treaty advice and consent process in the fall of
election years, than during the rest of the year.
Finally, if indeed presidents can successfully anticipate which treaties will be difficult to shepherd
through the ratification process, they should hold those treaties for longer periods, which should augur
well for their eventual passage. Thus, as discussed below, we model the first part of this two-phase
process separately from the transmit-to-ratification stage, anticipating that:
10 Recall much of the controversial negotiations about the debt ceiling revolved around whether there would be
another debate that would be needed closer to the 2012 elections, with the clear implication that no rational
Congressperson would want to engage in that debate in the shadow of an election.
P5: Longer times to transmit treaties will lead to quicker ratification
Advice and consent as a two-step process
The fate of US treaties, and thus an opportunity cost theory of treaty ratification, cannot be examined
without considering the process more fully. After the US signs an agreement, the president decides
whether to transmit it to the senate, and then the senate Foreign Relations Committee decides whether to
recommend the treaty and pass it out of committee along with a treaty document drafted by the senate
Foreign Relations Committee. This treaty document then moves to the floor for debate, possible
amendments, and a vote. To provide its advice and consent, the senate must pass the document with no
less than a two-thirds majority. In addition, at any time a treaty can be returned to the president or, if the
committee reports the treaty but no vote transpires, the treaty can go back to the committee.
We model the treaty advice and consent process as a two-step process. The first step, the transmittal
decision, is important to consider, because as the introduction suggest, it may well be strategic. Indeed,
when President Clinton wanted to introduce the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1995, Jessie
Helms felt so strongly about it that the then chair of the senate foreign relations committee, Senator
Helms, and 26 cosponsors, introduced a Senate Resolution urging the President to not transmit the
Convention to the Senate. Why would he care to do that? As chair of the Senate Foreign Relations
committee, he could just sit on the treaty. However, once the treaty is transmitted, a more favorable
chairman in a future senate could move it to the floor. Withholding transmittal can be politically
advantageous.
Because at least some transmittal decisions are likely to be strategic, simply examining all treaties that are
transmitted leaves out a valuable and quite likely non-random set of the sample. On the other hand,
simply modeling signature time to ratification oversimplifies the process and ignores that there are some
treaties the senate cannot provide with its advice and consent, because the president has never transmitted
them to the senate.
We therefore first model the transmittal decision, so that our ratification model can take the transmittal
decisions into account. Transmitting treaties to the Senate does not have opportunity costs in that the
number of treaties that a president can transmit is not fixed or bounded in any way because a transmittal
itself does not take up senate time, and the preparatory time to prepare the transmittal materials can be
obtained from multiple staff as needed. One factor may influence the president however, namely
reputation. Because the president usually endorses the treaty in the transmittal letter, the act of transmittal
is a request to the Senate for support for the endorsement. Thus, there may be a reputational cost to
transmitting treaties and have them stall (Krutz and Peake 2009 140). The decision to transmit a treaty
may backfire if the treaty engenders controversy. Sometimes a president may want to transmit a treaty
regardless of its prospects, to make a statement. However, to minimize reputational costs, a president is
likely to use is backwards deduction of the likelihood that a transmitted treaty will go through the senate
speedily. Thus, transmittals should be less likely when the president expects the treaty to be harder to
ratify.
P6: The more conservative the chair of the foreign relations committee, the longer the president should
take to transmit a treaty.
Political preferences may also guide treaty transmittal at the presidential level in the direction reasoned
above with Republican Senators. Thus,
P7: Republican presidents should take longer to transmit treaties.
Both of these factors are likely to also influence ratification decisions, so omitting consideration of these
in the transmittal stage would bias the analysis.
Finally, the number of treaties that the United States concludes varies from year to year, just as it will
vary how many untransmitted treaties a president inherits from his predecessor. Thus, one might expect
that the more treaties a president needs to make decisions about, the slower these decisions may be.
Therefore:
P8: The greater the pool of treaties eligible for transmission, the longer presidents should take to
transmit treaties
Descriptive data
Time period
For the statistical analysis, our data includes multilateral treaties concluded and signed by the US since
1967. We chose this year, because that is when the government database, THOMAS, becomes
complete.11 THOMAS does include some treaties signed before 1967, but we do not include these,
because THOMAS only includes them if the transmittal occurred after 1966. This means that the pre1967 treaties included in THOMAS are a sub-sample biased towards delayed treaties. To avoid biasing
our analysis, we omitted these. However, we do include some treaties that are not in THOMAS. These are
the treaties that the US has signed, but the president has not yet transmitted them to the Senate.
Unfortunately no list of such treaties exists. Furthermore, it is potentially tricky to decide which
international agreements belong on this list, as some of them may be executive agreements that do not
require senate advice and consent. To devise an accurate list, we searched multiple available treaty
databases for agreements signed by the United States, but to which the United States had not yet become
a party. These databases include the United Nations Treaty Database, ECOLEX,12 The Hague
Conference on Private International Law,13 and Oceana Law.14 We also compared our list against a list
of multilateral treaties from Gamble’s dataset on treaties and Wikipedia’s “treaties by year of
conclusion.”15 After assembling this list, we consulted with the Office of the Assistant Legal Adviser for
Treaty Affairs in the State Department. Here Frank Holleran, the Treaty Analyst and Depositary Officer,
helped us identify treaties that were not designated to go through the advice and consent process, and also
added some treaties that we had missed. Thus, we are quite confident that our list of un-transmitted
treaties is accurate and that the treaties included are indeed ones requiring senate advice and consent.
Bilateral treaties
We limit our statistical analysis to multilateral treaties, for several reasons. About half the treaties that go
through the advice and consent process in the United States are bilateral, but these bilateral treaties differ
from multilateral treaties in at least four important ways. First, bilateral treaties tend to deal with a narrow
set of topics. The bilateral treaties transmitted to the senate between 1967 and 2011 belong primarily to
five categories: consular conventions (17), property or copyright treaties (9), tax conventions (129),
investment treaties (49) and extradition treaties (147). Together these treaties make up 350 treaties, which
constitute 88 percent of all the non-multilateral treaties in Thomas that were transmitted in 1967 or later.
11 Prior to 1976, the data points needed are not recorded anywhere centralized, and even knowing whether one has
the complete set of treaties is a challenge, as merely relying on the Treaties in Force, excludes treaties that are no
longer in force, for example.
12 http://www.ecolex.org/start.php
13 http://www.hcch.net/index_en.php
14 http://www.oceanalaw.com/
15 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category: Treaties_by_year_of_conclusion
Second, bilateral treaties often are renewals or revisions of treaties with a given country repeatedly. Thus,
for example, 8 of the tax conventions approved for senate advice and consent since 1967 are with Canada.
This means that these treaties often are minor revisions of previous documents, which reduces the need
for debate. For these reasons, Galbraith calls these treaties “repetitive bilateral treaties” (Galbraith 2012
4).
Third, bilateral treaties often follow various standard formats. This enables the senate to deal with them in
bundles, meaning that the senate passes two or more treaties of the same kind on the same date, and often
as part of the same vote. Typically 4-8 treaties are bundled. Thus, half the consular conventions were
bundled with at least one other treaty. The senate bundled 95 percent of the tax conventions, 89 percent of
the property or copyright treaties, 87 percent of extradition treaties and 88 percent of investment treaties.
The senate bundled extradition treaties 82 percent of the time, in one case providing advice and consent to
30 treaties on the same day. This bundling means that any delay in passing these bilateral treaties is
irregular because the senate will hold them until there is a hearing for treaties of a given type. Indeed, the
senate routinely holds hearings on treaties of a given type once a year or every two years (interview).
Thus the standard format of most bilateral treaties leads the senate to deal with them very differently than
multilateral treaties which must by and large by dealt with on an ad hoc basis.
Forth, because the treaties are negotiated bilaterally, the US has even greater ability to obtain its desired
outcomes than in multilateral negotiations. If the US is not successful, the negotiations will break down
and there will be no agreement. However, if the US is successful, it is likely that the terms of the
agreement are closer to US preferences and therefore less controversial and thus will encounter less
opposition in the senate – which in turn reduces the opportunity cost of providing advice and consent.
Thus, opportunity cost is less likely to greatly delay the advice and consent of bilateral agreements.
Thus, bilateral treaties differ significantly from multilateral treaties, both in content, partners, and in how
the senate chooses to handle them. That said, the fact that the senate indeed chooses to bundle these
treaties provides support for the opportunity cost argument. The similarity of these treaties reduces the
need for debate and subsequently facilitates bundling, which in turn reduces the need for senate floor time
and thus the opportunity cost to the senate.
Congressional Executive Agreements
It is for similar reasons that we do not include executive agreements in the analysis, although for purposes
of international law they are identical. Executive agreements take two forms: sole and congressional. Sole
executive agreements are made by the president alone and actually constitute the vast majority of
international agreements to which the US is a party. Sole-executive agreement can only cover matters
within the President's authority or matters in which Congress has delegated authority to the President.
With a few notable exceptions, these agreements are routine. Congressional executive agreements are
another matter. These require passage in both the House and the Senate. However, the requirement for
passage is only a majority vote. Therefore the possibilities for blocking the legislation and taking up
valuable floor time are not as great, and the opportunity cost of pushing the agreement to a vote is
therefore not as great either. Furthermore, the congressional executive agreements tend to concern matters
of trade, the one foreign policy area outside of war that probably concerns citizens most because it
influences both jobs and consumer prices (Fordham and McKeown 2003). Thus, we would expect
legislators to be more willing to spend time on congressional executive agreements.
Multilateral treaties
As discussed above, we focus on multilateral treaties for several reasons. In addition to the concerns
above, a focus on multilateral treaties also has the benefit of focusing the analysis on those agreements
most likely to influence broader global cooperation.
Once we limit the sample to multilateral post-1967 treaties, there are 306 treaties for which we have
complete information. Figure 1 displays what happened to each of these. Note that 20 percent of treaties
were never ratified, either because the president never transmitted them, or because the senate has not
provided its advice and consent or has returned them to the president. See Figure 1
Figure 2 shows the distribution of years from signature to ratification. The data shows that about half of
treaties are transmitted and ratified within about four years of signature. As noted, about a quarter are
never ratified, so this means that the remaining treaties, also about a quarter, experience substantial
delays.
Recieved senate
advice and consent
(244)
Treaties signed by the
United States
(306*)
Transmitted to the
Senate
(279)
Returned to the
president
(11)
Not transmitted
(27)
Pending in the senate
(24)
Figure 1: Treaty outcomes for multilateral treaties signed since 1967 (as of Feb 15, 2011, not including
treaty actions in 2012).
* One treaty that was never signed by the US was sent to the senate. This can occur if the president decides to seek
senate advice and consent on a treaty after it has closed for signature.
Figure 2: Distribution of years from signature to ratification for multilateral treaties signed since 1967
The next three figures display absolute signature, transmittal and ratification trends over time. Figure 3
displays signatures. Note the bursts of signatures in the early 1970s and the 1990s, and also the much
lower rate of US signature of international agreements in recent years: Whereas until 2003 the US has
always signed at least 4 multilateral treaties a year, after 2003 there has been three years when it signed
only one such agreement, and one year, 2008, when it signed none. This shows that the flow of treaties
available for transmittal is not at all constant, something we will consider later in the model. Figure 4
shows that the number of transmitted treaties likewise varies a lot from year to year. It is interesting to
both note in Figure 4 and 5 the low activity during the Obama administration. Indeed, the year 2010 under
president Obama marks the first year in our sample that no multilateral treaty was ratified at all.
Furthermore, the pattern in Figure 4 suggests that, as hypothesized, more treaties receive senate advice
and consent in election years. Indeed, the average number of treaties ratified in an election year is 7.00
whereas only 4.96 are ratified in non-election years. In a t-test this difference is statistically significant at
the 5 percent level.
Figure 3: Number of multilateral treaties signed by the United States per year since 1967
Figure 4: Number of multilateral treaties transmitted to senate per year since 1967
Figure 5: Number of multilateral treaties receiving advice and consent by the senate per year since 1967
Our hypotheses P4a expected that treaty ratification will be faster in presidential election years, and
especially during lame-duck years. This means that we should expect to see more multilateral treaties pass
during those times. Figure 6 shows how many multilateral treaties pass on average in a particular type of
year. its clear that on average the fewest multilateral treaties are passed in non-election years, more in
midterm election years , and even more in presidential election years. Finally, the average number of
treaties passed in lameduck years is clearly the highest, and is more than twice that in non-election years.
Figure 6: Average number
of multilateral treaties given senate advice and consent during a particular type of year, 1967-2011
Our hypothesis P4b expected that more treaties end up being passed in the fall of election years, than
during the rest of the year, and that this should be especially true in lame duck election years. Figure 7
shows the distribution of
It is also interesting to consider the activity in the Senate throughout the year, given that we have
expectations that the fall, especially before elections, will tend to be more active for treaties. Figure 6
shows the frequencies of treaty ratification in months throughout the different types of years. In general
there is a certain rhythm to the year. Even in non-election years, treaties are more likely to be passed late
summer and fall. However this trend gets increasingly pronounced as we move into election years, then
presidential election years and finally lame duck years, where it is by far the most pronounced with
September seeing a virtual flurry of treaties.
Figure 7: Average number of
multilateral treaties passed in a given month, 1967-2011
Figure 7: Monthly Distribution of final multilateral treaty actions since 1967
Finally, Figure 8 shows the multilateral treaties transmitted and ratified by President and Senate party
composition since 1967. The party of the president is listed first, so that ‘RepDem’ is a republication
president with a democratic senate. It turns out that the years with a republican president and a democratic
senate were more productive for treaty ratification than were other years, a pattern consistent with
research on arms treaties (Krepon and Caldwell 1991 417). Republican senates appear to provide advice
and consent less often, which is consistent with our expectation about conservative senators being less
supportive of treaties, as is the fact the least treaties are signed when Republicans hold both the senate and
the presidency.
Figure 8: Distribution of number of treaties signed, transmitted and receiving advice and consent by
political composition, 1967-2011.
Analysis
To more formally investigate our hypotheses, we undertake a multivariate analysis of our treaty data. Our
data is time-series, cross-sectional by nature, set up in treaty-year format, to capture changes in the key
independent variables over time, should a treaty remain on the president’s desk or in the senate for more
than one year. Thus, each variable we describe below is coded on a yearly basis.
Core Variables
Given our arguments above, we expect several variables to influence the length of time it takes for
Presidents to transmit treaties to the Senate as well as the time from transmittal to ratification. Based on
P1, we define SFR Chair as the DW-Nominate score of the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee. The Nominate score measures the underlying liberal-conservative spectrum of the voting
record of members of Congress (Lewis and Poole 2004). Higher Nominate scores suggest a more
conservative committee chair, while lower values suggest a more liberal chair. Because the chair of the
committee remains for two years, this variable changes every other year.
We also attempt to test P1 through a second variable, also based on the DW-Nominate score. This
variable, labeled Conservative Senator measures the Nominate score of the most conservative Senator in
the chamber. The presumption is that highly conservative legislators are highly skeptical of international
entanglements and that the presence of even a single, highly conservative Senator is enough to deter the
president from transmitting a treaty and/or the Senate from giving its advise and consent.
P2 is examined by introducing the variable Senate Activity. This variable is taken from the Congressional
Quarterly and codes the number of bills passed by the Senate each year.
We examine the influence of political party support in the Senate (P3) by defining President % Control,
which is the percentage of the Senate controlled by the party of the President. Traditionally, scholars
would expect this variable to lead to an easier road to ratification. We, however, expect this to be
associated with a longer time to transmission to the Senate since the President will slow down the
transmission process if he feels the treaty will take up valuable Senate time.
To address P4, involving the dynamics of the electoral calendar and its effect on opportunity costs, we
define two variables: Lameduck and Re-election. The first of these two variables is coded as 1 in the final
year of a two-term president’s term. The second of these is defined as 1 in the final year of a president’s
first term, when he is up for re-election.
P5 is tested by calculating a predicted time to transmit from the President’s desk. We estimate a first
stage model (with the variables included here as well as controls discussed below), then calculate a
predicted median survival time – that is, the time the treaty will sit on the president’s desk. Again, we
expect that longer periods of time on the president’s desk should lead to faster ratification in the second
stage of the ratification process: Senate advise and consent.
Next, P6 through P8 apply only to Presidential decision to transmit. For P6, we rely on the SFR Chair as
defined above. For P7, we define Democratic President, which equals 1 if the President is a Democrat.
Finally, to test P8 we calculate the number of treaties available to be transmitted based on the number of
untransmitted treaties left from previous presidents and the new number of treaties concluded during the
year. We label this variable Treaties Available.
Control factors
Of course, other factors may influence both the president’s decision to transmit a treaty to the Senate as
well as the Senate ratification process. To this end, we introduce several control variables to both models.
We expect presidents with high approval ratings to be better positioned to push along ratification, thus we
control for the president’s approval rating, by introducing Approval. This is the annual average of the
Gallup presidential approval poll for each year of observation.16
It is also important to control for the type of treaty under consideration. Issue area could have important
implications for the speed at which the treaty moves through the process. To this end, we classify treaties
into four broad categories of types: Human Rights (e.g., UN human rights treaties), Commercial (e.g.,
trade agreements), International Law (e.g., technical treaties regarding rules and procedures in
international law), Environment (e.g., regulatory treaties involving the environment), and Arms Control
(e.g., multilateral arms treaties such as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty).
We also control for whether the treaty has already entered into force globally. That is, has the treaty gone
into effect without the ratification of the US. We code this variable based on effective dates in the UN
Treaty Series and label the variable Global in Force. We expect that this variable could speed the
ratification process if the US is left on the outside looking in during the ratification process.
16 Data is taken from the Gallup web site. www.gallup.com.
As in the first stage model, we compute for the ratification model the number of treaties available to be
ratified based on the number of pending treaties in the beginning of a year and the number of new treaties
transmitted during the year. We also label this variable Treaties Available.
Finally, we add a variable to the ratification stage of the model to measure whether the treaty itself is selfexecuting. That is, does the integration of the treaty into US law end with its ratification or is further
legislative activity (enabling legislation) required? It is possible that the need for further legislative
activity will deter the ratification of the legislation. We code this variable, labeled Implementation, based
on a reading of the treaty texts. The variable is coded 1 if more legislation is required, zero otherwise.
To analyze data on time to transmission or ratification, we turn to event history or duration models
following Krutz and Peake (2009). As shown in Figure 7 and 8, the underlying distributions of the timeto-transmit and time-to-ratify dependent variables follows a Weibull distribution. In our subsequent
multivariate analysis, we estimate a series of Weibull models, using the accelerated failure time metric to
ease interpretation. For our coefficient estimates, it should be noted that positive signs indicate a positive
effect on the hazard rate, meaning shorter ratification times. Negative signs indicate longer ratification
times.
Figure 7. Hazard rate for treaties signed by the US transmitted to the Senate.
Figure 8. Hazard rate for ratification of treaties transmitted to Senate.
Results
The estimates of our first model are found in Table 1. We initially estimate the time-to-transmit model to
analyze what factors lead presidents to submit signed treaties to the Senate. These estimates are presented
in column 1 of Table 1.
We find that, consistent with our expectation, SFR Chair is negative and statistically significant,
indicating that more conservative chairs lead to a lower hazard rate – i.e., longer transmit times. Similarly,
the more conservative is the most conservative Senator, the longer the transmit time from the President’s
desk, as suggested by the negative and statistically significant coefficient on Conservative Senator.
Conversely, the positive estimate of Democratic President indicates that democratic presidents more
quickly transmit signed treaties to the Senate for ratification.
Also consistent with our expectations, President Percent Control is negative and statistically significant.
This finding is strong evidence of the opportunity cost logic: the more co-partisans the President has in
the Senate, the longer he takes to transmit treaties. Again, this logic is in contrast to extant theories of the
production of domestic laws, where it is presumed stronger partisan support will facilitate legislative
production.
And while the Commercial indicator for treaty type is statistically distinct from the reference category,
chi-square tests show it cannot be distinguished from other treaty categories.
This first stage model is important in that it both helps to determine what makes the president decide to
send treaties into the advice and consent process, and it allows us to generate an instrument for the second
model, which estimates the time-to-ratification once the treaty hits the Senate.17 We thus use this
transmit model to predict the time that a treaty remains with the president – a variable we can then
introduce into the model of the second phase of the ratification process: time to ratification.
We now have an instrument that contains the factors that will influence whether the president believes a
treaty will have difficulty in the Senate. Should he believe this is the case, we would see longer expected
transmit times. If the president’s strategic decisions are correct, our prediction is that longer transmit
times should predict shorter ratification times, since the president should have waited for an opportune
time to act.
Turning to our model of Senate ratification, the model specification is different in three ways. First, the
dependent variable now measures the time between presidential transmission and Senate ratification.
Second, we adjust the variable Number Available to Transmit to Number Available to Ratify. This
variable helps to identify (statistically), the two-stage model we are estimating since it is unique between
each model. Finally, we add the predicted probability from the transmit stage estimated above, as well as
the Implementation measure.
The estimates of the ratification model can be found in Column 2 of Table 1. Note that nearly all of the
domestic political variables that were statistically significant in the first stage do not achieve statistical
significance in the second stage. Namely, Democratic President, President Percent Control, and
Conservative Senator do not achieve conventional levels of statistical significance. Rather, these
domestic political factors exert their influence in the decision of the President to transmit treaties; and
controlling for this factor through the predicted probability from the first stage attenuates their influence
on the treaty ratification process.
17 Note that the model gains identification from the inclusion of Senate Activity in the first stage and
Implementation in the second stage. In addition, because Treaties Available is measured as only those treaties on
the President’s desk in the first stage, it can also be used to help in model identification.
SFR Chair, however, is statistically significant in this second stage. Thus, a more conservative chair of
the Senate foreign relations committee slows down the advice and consent process, independently of its
effect on delaying presidential transmission.
Similarly, Lameduck is positive and significant, indicating that the Senate moves more quickly on treaties
in the final year of an executive’s eight year time in office when Senate floor time is less valuable.
The estimate of Predicted Transmit is positive and statistically significant. This is in line with our
expectations that if the president is making strategic decision about transmittal – factors that predict long
transmittal times lead to estimates of shorter ratification times. Thus, presidents appear to at be able to at
least somewhat anticipate Senate advice and consent delays.
Finally, we note that In Force is negative and statistically significant. Thus, the Senate moves more
slowly on treaties that have already gone into force internationally. This is a difficult finding to interpret:
it is possible that the status of the treaty removes any impetus for the US to join – contrary to our initial
expectations. Yet, it is also possible that the fact that the US has not already ratified the treaty is an
indicator of a domestic controversy. This indicates a selection process whereby the expectation of this
variable should be reversed.
Conclusion
Existing international relations theory expects states to join treaty regimes if they serve the national
interest. Yet it does not take much to see this as an oversimplification: there are many cases where the US
has not ratified a treaty, yet shows its support for the treaty in other ways, indicating that the treaty serves
its interests. To explain this, scholars of American politics will quickly add that, of course, what really
matters is whether actors with veto powers in the political process believe that the treaty is in the national
interest. Because of the power they hold over the process, the political preferences of the senate foreign
relations chair or the 2/3-senator can derail the senate advice and consent process. These actors may
oppose treaties based on principled issues that have little to do with the substance of the treaty
cooperation, for example. Or strong lobbies against a treaty may deter them from supporting the treaty.
Whatever the origin of their preferences, they have the ability to essentially hold the treaty hostage.
We agree that is not possible to look at the national interest in ratifying a treaty in isolation from the
domestic political opposition. However, we argue that not even this traditional veto-player analysis fully
explains US treaty participation. Sometimes those opposed to the treaty are not in veto positions.
Sometimes even benign treaties, with little opposition at all, fall by the wayside.
Our analysis reveals another much less appreciated factor that influences the treaty process: the
opportunity costs of senate time.
Our analysis has shown that the United States often delays or abstains from ratifying treaties because the
constitutionally required advice and consent process increases the political costs of treaty ratification.
Specifically, we have articulated an opportunity cost theory of treaty ratification. This theory argues that
the fixed agenda space of the senate adds an opportunity cost to ratification, because the president and the
senate has to decide whether to spend time on the treaty or to spend time on other, often more valued,
domestic legislation. The opportunity cost is partly a function of political preferences, but, more
interestingly, it is also a function of the political value of the senate floor time. Thus, the decision to push
a treaty through the advice and consent process may be less about an objective examination of costs and
benefits of the treaty (as assumed by traditional analysis) than about the benefit of spending time on the
treaty relative to the benefit of other possible agenda activity that may produce important domestic
legislation such as health care reform, for example. In other words: senate advice and consent depends on
the associated opportunity costs.
This insight is what explains otherwise perplexing patterns of US treaty behavior such as the fact that
Senate support for the president delays rather than accelerates treaty ratifications. However, this pattern
becomes understandable in the light of our opportunity cost theory: The more support the president
enjoys, the more productive the senate is being in passing domestic legislation, and the further the
president and the senate are from their re-election campaigns, the more valuable the time of the senate
agenda is. Thus, these conditions increase the opportunity costs for treaties, and the president or the
senate may find them so large that the treaty either gets delayed or becomes entirely stuck.
These findings speak both to American politics and international relations. For American politics, the
findings reveal something new and interesting. Prior analysis of the other Senate advice and consent
process, namely that of Presidential nominations, has found that divided government, political
polarization and elections obstructs senate advice and consent. In contrast, we find that treaty advice and
consent is more, not less, likely when the president lacks strong support in the Senate, when the senate is
gridlocked, and during election years. Based on our opportunity cost theory, we argue that this is because
Presidential nominations are domestic matters, which are forced onto the Senate agenda whereas treaties
are foreign policy matters, which are optional and face multiple hurdles. Indeed, the work on presidential
nominations demonstrates the core of the opportunity cost argument, namely that it is time consuming to
force controversial items on the Senate agenda.
For international relations theory, the findings mean that there is not as straightforward translation from
some unified national preferences into national politics as traditional cross-national analysis of treaty
ratification assumes. Traditional analysis of state participation in international treaties usually treats states
as unitary actors and assumes that their decision to join treaties depends purely on an analysis of its costs
and benefits and that states therefore will join treaties that are in their interests. More sophisticated
incorporation of domestic preferences as advocated by theory on two-level games is useful, but it too
expects that treaties that enjoy wide support would receive timely Senate advice and consent. However,
we find that in the United States, Senate rules can make treaty ratification time consuming if there is even
the slightest opposition to a treaty or the need to pass implementing legislation. Or a particular treaty may
simply be too low a priority to compete with other legislative demands. Thus, even treaties that enjoy the
support of 2/3 of Senators, enough technically to win senate advice and consent, may have to wait a long
time to be scheduled for a floor vote or may never make it.
This finding also has implications for global cooperation. The United States often plays a pivotal role in
whether international cooperative efforts are successful. Without the United States, it may be harder to get
other countries to join, and the United States itself may lack a full voice within newly created
organizations.
Table 1: Weibull models of multilateral treaty ratification, 1967-2008.
President % Control
Approval
International Law
Human Rights
Arms Control
Transmit
Ratify
-1.934*
-1.394
(1.026)
(1.092)
-0.008
-0.001
(0.005)
(0.005)
0.062
0.452*
(0.202)
(0.262)
-0.336
-0.407
(0.423)
(0.455)
0.089
(0.302)
Commercial
Implementation
0.439***
0.533**
(0.256)
0.220
(0.200)
(0.291)
--.--
-0.226
(0.194)
Lameduck
Re-election
Dem. President
Availability+
SFR Chair
-0.071
0.432**
(0.235)
(0.172)
-0.163
0.399
(0.144)
(0.128)
0.491***
0.148
(0.156)
(0.174)
-0.007
-0.010
(0.013)
(0.007)
-0.526***
-0.826***
(0.150)
(0.163)
Conserv. Senator
In Force
Predicted Transmit
-2.008**
-0.193
(0.895)
(0.848)
-0.550**
-0.717***
(0.219)
(0.211)
--.--
0.145**
(0.077)
Senate Activity
0.001*
--.--
(0.000)
Constant
N
ln_p
0.795
-0.743
(0.955)
(1.022)
1305
1117
0.157***
(0.050)
-0.001
(0.056)
Note: *** = p<0.01; ** = p<0.05; * = p<0.10; all tests two-tailed. Robust standard error estimates are
computed. + = Availability altered based on transmit or ratification stage.
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