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Does participation in international organizations increase cooperation?

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Abstract

Recent research asserts that public commitments to international institutions promote behavior that is consistent with institutional purposes. Evidence for this proposition is based almost entirely on studies that compare the behavior of states that have and have not ratified treaties. This paper evaluates instances in which some member states temporarily experience increased entanglement with an IO because they or their nationals serve in a position of authority. Unlike selection into IOs, selection into positions of authority is often governed by a common, observable, and partially exogenous process. I exploit exogenous exit, random assignment to different term lengths, and competitive elections in three contexts: the International Criminal Court (ICC), the UN Human Rights Commission (UNHRC), and the UN Security Council (UNSC). The evidence implicates that acquiring a position of authority can make states more willing to reject U.S. advances to sign non-surrender agreements, adopt domestic legislation that changes the penal code (ICC case), ratify legally binding treaties (UNHRC case), and contribute to peacekeeping missions (UNSC case). On the other hand, there is no evidence that UN institutions successfully select more cooperative states for positions of authority. Similar research designs can gainfully be employed to identify the causal effects of other forms of institutional participation.

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Notes

  1. http://www.amnesty.org/en/united-nations/human-rights-council (accessed June 11, 2011).

  2. I thank James Lebovic for sharing this data.

  3. I excluded outlier cases (countries that had increased peacekeepers by 1,000 or more in any period) and found the same pattern.

  4. The natural log is taken as the distribution of troop contributions is highly skewed. Nevertheless, the results are similar without transformation.

  5. Analysts are sometimes skeptical about fixed effects with lagged dependent variables due to the potential for Hurwicz or Nickell bias: that the fixed effects bias the estimate of the lagged dependent variable downwards. The main results also hold in a fixed effect specification without lagged dependent variable and in a random effects specification with a lagged dependent variable. They also hold in an error-correction specification where the dependent variable is differenced. Moreover, they hold when using monthly data where the number of time periods is so large that any Nickell bias should be very small. Finally, concerns about Nickell bias should be larger when estimating various time trends on each other as opposed to the effect of an indicator variable.

  6. A lost election is defined by having acquired at least 5 votes in an election. This is to rule out cases where countries get one or two “protest votes” even though they had not campaigned. This does not include cases where countries campaigned by did not participate in the election because they realized they would not get sufficient votes.

  7. The monthly data may be plagued by problems with unit roots. Although the main independent variable is not a trend variable but an indicator variable, there are other trend variables in the model whose coefficients become unreliable. For the annual data, we can reject the null-hypothesis from the augmented Dickey-Fuller test that all panels contain unit roots (p = .000, Inverse chi-squared test based on STATA command xtunitroot).

  8. I calculate voting coincidence with the U.S. by computing an index of agreement where identical votes are counted as full agreement whereas an abstention paired with a no vote count as .5 agreement. This is similar to “S-scores” or other Affinity indicators that are generally used in the literature.

  9. Results available from the author.

  10. This finding does not necessarily contradict the finding by Dreher et al. (2013) that states from Africa and Asia are more likely to get elected if they contribute more troops. Aside from the fact that finding is based on a different period and is restricted to two continents, the finding here says that states that get elected or compete for election do not increase their contributions just before the election. It could be that states are rewarded for long-term cooperative behavior.

  11. UNSC elections are run within regions, which means that sometimes there may be three states vying for two positions, thus explaining the higher number of winners.

  12. The estimate is significant at the 5 % level (one-tailed). Results available from author.

  13. Exceptions were made for NATO states and some other allies (see: http://www.state.gov/t/pm/rls/othr/misc/23425.htm).

  14. Kelley discusses alternative approaches to estimation, such as Heckman selection models, but argues that there are no obvious variables that can be excluded from the ratification equation and thus that the effect of ratification cannot be separately identified, although she highlights that domestic rule of law does not significantly predict ratification.

  15. Ribando (2006). This happened before Evo Morales was elected in December 2005 on an anti-American platform.

  16. See: http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/AMR18/002/2004/en/45f6cfe7-d630-11dd-ab95a13b602c0642/amr180022004en.html (accessed June 19, 2009).

  17. http://www.iccnow.org/documents/BoliviaresistBIA01Jun04.pdf

  18. Quoted in: “U.S. Threatens Bolivia in Effort to Secure Criminal Court Immunity.” Pacific News Service, March 3 2005. http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=40d8f93957008266edbc544c21df75be (accessed June 19, 2009).

  19. Ghana did not sign a BIA treaty but concluded an executive agreement stating that it would not extradite U.S. nationals to the jurisdiction of the ICC. Since these are treated as equivalent by the US State Department and NGOs such as ICCnow, I also do not highlight this distinction.

  20. Parliamentary debate, October 29, 2003. Quoted in: http://www.iccnow.org/documents/HighOfficialQuotes_Current.pdf. Ghanaian judge Kuenyahia is Vice-President of the ICC.

  21. Results are available here: http://untreaty.un.org/cod/icc/elections/results/1st_round.htm (accessed July 2, 2009).

  22. For more detail see: ICC/ASP/1/4 “Elections of the Judges of the International Criminal Court”: http://www.iccnow.org/documents/NoteElectionJudges200212Eng.pdf (accessed July 2, 2009).

  23. The last elected judge was Claude Jorda (France) who defeated Nigerian candidate Adolphus Karibi-White (the other candidates had been withdrawn).

  24. Five of the six judges that sat for reelection were reelected in 2006, the sixth lost. There were only 10 candidates at the second election.

  25. Below are the descriptive statistics on these variables

    Variable

    N

    Mean

    Std. Dev.

    Min

    Max

    Ln (GDP)

    41

    25.15414

    1.867464

    21.50534

    28.1402

    Military Aid cut

    41

    .3902439

    .4938648

    0

    1

    Rule of Law

    41

    .2514634

    .9500436

    −1.4

    1.98

    LikeMinded

    41

    .6829268

    .471117

    0

    1

    Polity

    41

    7.512195

    3.099371

    0

    10

  26. For the application of logit models to regression discontinuity models, see Berk and De Leeuw (1999). A linear probability model returns nearly identical results.

  27. PRIO/Uppsala Armed Conflict Dataset. Danner and Simmons interact this variable with democracy. Doing so does not generate different results here.

  28. Every UN member state will be reviewed every 4 years but all states undergo a review during their HRC membership.

  29. http://www.apt.ch/npm/asiapacific/Philippines1.pdf, April 22, 2008 (accessed June 8, 2011).

  30. Ibid.

  31. 20 November 2007.

  32. Later elections have been much less competitive.

  33. I examined covariate imbalance as in Fig. 3 for GDP per capita, democracy (Polity), CIRI empowerment and physical integrity rights indicators, and common law. These are all important determinants of treaty status in the literature. Elected status was not significant in any regression.

  34. Amnesty International, Amnesty International’s Guide to UN Human Rights Council Candidates (2006).

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  1. Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA

    Erik Voeten

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Voeten, E. Does participation in international organizations increase cooperation?. Rev Int Organ 9, 285–308 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-013-9176-y

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