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Previous research suggests that most treaties are ineffective in ensuring countries' compliance with human rights standards. It has been argued, however, that preferential trade agreements (PTAs) including 'hard' human rights standards can withhold economic benefits and, thus, can have a real potential to substantially reduce human rights violations. The following article questions this as existent work on the effects of PTAs on human rights standards neglects a selection process underlying the implementation of these treaties. Countries being aware of the 'shadow of the future' already take into account what may happen at the succeeding enforcement stage when establishing a particular PTA. This implies that states agree on 'hard' human rights standards in PTAs only if they have a general propensity to abide by human rights in the first place. For testing the empirical implications of their argument, the authors collected new data on PTAs in 1976/77-2009, and employ genetic matching techniques. The results support the theoretical argument that PTAs are unlikely to affect human rights compliance when controlling for the outlined selection problem. Adapted from the source document.

Existing research seems to agree that European Union (EU) accession conditionality facilitated processes of political and economic transformation for the recent enlargement rounds. However, despite its importance, systematic research beyond small-N qualitative studies that produces generalizable insights is scarce. Most strikingly, it remains unclear at which stage of the enlargement process and to what extent candidate countries complied with EU law in the context of accession conditionality. Building upon previous theoretical accounts, the authors argue that candidates' compliance behaviour can be examined more thoroughly when focusing on the credibility of EU conditionality at different phases over the process of accession negotiations, which are characterized by varying degrees of membership probability. The article's main contribution stems from the empirical analysis, which employs generalized additive models on new data of candidate countries' compliance with EU law under accession conditionality from 1998 to 2009. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

This study examines the influence of civil–military relations on military effectiveness. More specifically, we investigate how coup-proofing, that is, the strategies and tactics employed to prevent the military from seizing power, affects battlefield performance. The main argument claims that coup-proofing has a negative impact on soldiers' leadership qualities, initiative, and the ability to coordinate different military units. Ultimately, the higher a country's coup-proofing efforts relative to its opponent, the worse its effectiveness on the battlefield. We test this hypothesis using data on battlefield outcomes and coup-proofing between 1967 and 1999.

Various studies argue that larger groups are less likely to optimally provide a collective good. The following paper builds upon this work as it examines the provision of environmental collective goods through international regimes. Although the regime literature studied problems of collective action and their respective solutions before, we lack the knowledge to explain which situational characteristics actually induce these problems. The following article thus first disaggregates these characteristics along demand-side properties of goods (i.e., public goods, externalities, and common pool resources) and group size, and then analyzes their impact on international environmental regimes' depth of cooperation. The authors find evidence that larger regimes face problems for providing environmental public goods in an optimal way. Furthermore, the analysis demonstrates that this negative relationship holds true for externalities, but not for common pool resources. Adapted from the source document.

In one of the first quantitative designs, we explore the impact of both legalisation and flexibility on regime effectiveness, using data on international environmental institutions. One of the main implications is that 'precision' is an important determinant of regime performance. If the rule and norm system is well defined, well understood and clear, then a regime tends to be more effective in addressing an environmental problem. We do not find evidence, however, that 'hard law' is more effective than 'soft law' or that delegation mechanisms may be relevant. Second, flexibility in the regime structure increases regime performance - regular instead of subsidiary bodies enhance flexibility and thus have a positive effect on a regime's environmental problem management. Flexibility in states' agenda setting power, membership and decision making do not seem to have a crucial influence, though. Adapted from the source document.

The UN has developed a diverse range of peacemaking tools, including different forms of political initiatives (diplomatic, technocratic, and political-development missions) and peacekeeping operations. Yet, we know surprisingly little about when and why we observe the onset of different types of UN missions. Examining an "escalatory trajectory," we analyze the United Nations Peace Initiatives (UNPI) data, a new data set providing information on all different types of UN engagements. Our main contributions are that we provide insights about how the different types of missions relate to one another and conceptual clarity about what the different types of missions are.

This article examines how populism is linked to party organization and, specifically, intra-party democracy. Populism can be defined as an ideology (ideational perspective), which is characterized by anti-elitism, people-centrism, and a discourse emphasizing a moral struggle between "good people" and "the elite." On the other hand, there are leadership-focused definitions which see populism as a form of organization with personalistic control (a leadership perspective). With respect to party organization, focusing on the ideational perspective leads to the expectation that populist parties will be internally democratic, and the leadership approach will lead to the opposite expectation. Using the recently published Populism and Political Expert Survey (POPPA) that develops party-specific populism scores, we examine more than 200 parties in 26 countries. The results highlight that populist parties gravitate toward personalized leaders and thus develop less democratic intra-party structures. This finding contributes to our understanding of populist parties and their organizations.

Terrorists aim at influencing audiences beyond their immediate victims, but can only achieve this if an attack receives sufficient public attention. Previous research shows that terrorism can affect public opinion, but these studies are mainly based on emblematic single cases and relate to varying measures of influence, which are difficult to compare. This research focuses on the first-order effect of terrorism: attention. To analyze whether terrorists get attention, we combine a quasi-experimental approach for causal identification with a comparative design. We compile data from Eurobarometer surveys and contrast responses of more than 80,000 individuals surveyed before and after five diverse Islamist attacks in Europe in 2013–2019. Attention to terrorism increases in all targeted countries, regardless of attack size. Yet, while all incidents raise attention to terrorism, only larger attacks exert a meaningful impact across Europe.

Conventional wisdom suggests that environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) play a major role in pushing states towards more ambitious environmental policies. However, demonstrating that this presumption is in fact true is rather difficult, because the same system structures of democracies that may create more opportunities for ENGO activities are also, on their own, conducive to better environmental policies. This leaves open the possibility that the additional (marginal) impact of ENGOs on policy making is smaller than presumed. In trying to disentangle these effects, this paper examines the influence of ENGOs contingent on key structural characteristics of democratic systems. We develop the argument that presidential systems with a plurality electoral rule per se tend to provide more environmental public goods, which induces a smaller marginal impact of ENGOs. Conversely, parliamentary systems with a proportional representation electoral rule are likely to provide fewer environmental public goods, which allows for a larger marginal impact of ENGOs. We find robust empirical support for these hypotheses in analyses that focus on the ratification behavior of 75 democracies vis-a-vis 250 international environmental agreements in 1973-2002. Adapted from the source document.

A rather unique feature of global climate negotiations is that most governments allow representatives of civil society organisations to be part of their national delegation. It remains unclear, however, why states grant such access in the first place. While there are likely to be benefits from formally including civil society, there are also substantial costs stemming from constraints on sovereignty. In light of this tradeoff, this article argues for a 'contagion' effect that explains this phenomenon besides domestic determinants. In particular, states, which are more central to the broader network of global governance, are more likely to be informed of and influenced by other states' actions and policies toward civil society. In turn, more central governments are likely to include civil society actors if other governments do so as well. This argument is tested with data on the participation of civil society organisations in national delegations to global climate negotiations between 1995 and 2005. To further uncover the underlying mechanisms, the article also provides an analysis of survey data collected at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations in Durban in 2011. Adapted from the source document.

Civil society is commonly assumed to have a positive effect on international cooperation. This paper sheds light on one important facet of this assumption: we examine the impact of environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) on ratification behavior of countries vis-à-vis international environmental agreements (IEAs). The main argument of the paper focuses on a "democracy-civil society paradox": although ENGOs have a positive effect on ratification of IEAs on average, this effect decreases with increasing levels of democracy. This argument is counter-intuitive and appears paradoxical because democracy is generally associated both with a more active civil society and more international cooperation. The reasons for this hypothesized effect pertain to public demand for environmental public goods provision, government incentives, and problems of collective action among ENGOs. To test the net effect of ENGOs on countries' ratification behavior, the paper uses a new dataset on ENGOs in the time-period 1973–2006. The results offer strong support for the presumed democracy–civil society paradox.