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AbstractAs major global challenges intensify in the twenty-first century, which domestic institutions will best enable countries to take decisive and positive action? This article explores this question in the realm of environmental policy. Scholars and practitioners have long argued that 'democracy' yields the best environmental outcomes, but others now maintain that 'eco-authoritarianism' may be the best way forward. The author unpacks the theoretical mechanisms behind these debates, and adds important nuance in making three arguments. First, the link between elections and eco-policy depends on what citizens want. Secondly, the relationship between civil liberties protections and environmentalism depends on which actors within society hold power. Finally, political constraints make environmental policy change – be it environmentally friendly or damaging – more difficult. The study empirically tests these arguments and finds strong support for the expectations regarding elections and civil liberties. There is only limited evidence that constraints stymie eco-policy change.

The international human rights (HR) regime is vast and complex. Yet, most of what we know about it draws from a handful of agreements, often chosen for their prominence and/or perceived centrality to the HR project. This article argues that HR research needs to expand its scope to encompass all agreements in this realm, and presents a new data resource that enables scholars to accomplish that goal. Using the data, I demonstrate that the literature has painted an unrepresentative portrait of HR agreements. In addition to making comprehensive analysis possible, the database moves the literature forward by (1) taking into account important legal distinctions in the process of making treaties binding, (2) providing information on treaty design, and (3) considering relationships between agreements. I present several applications and discuss future areas of inquiry. Network analysis and the linking of treaty participation to HR outcomes are two notable areas of interest.

This article argues that in order to understand how international human rights agreements (HRAs) work, scholars need to turn their attention to rights that are not definitional to democracy. When rights practices diverge from treaty rules, but the domestic enforcement mechanisms that give such agreements their bite are robust, how do governments behave? The study explores this question by examining a core treaty that prohibits child labor. When domestic enforcement is likely, states where many children work are often deterred from ratifying. Nevertheless, those that do ratify experience significant child labor improvements. By contrast, in non-democracies, ratification is a promise that is easily made but seldom kept.

A considerable challenge for the creators of international environmental agreements is how to design mechanisms that deter defection without deterring participation. Relatively ``soft'' law often garners widespread participation, but it creates few concrete incentives for states to improve behavior. ``Harder'' commitments make shirking more difficult, but these institutional features may deter from joining the very states whose practices are least consistent with the treaty's requirements. Empirical analyses of ratification of the core agreements of the climate change regime support these propositions. Flexibility provisions provide one mechanism for states to mitigate this dilemma. The findings with regard to one flexibility mechanism strongly support this argument. The results with regard to a second flexibility mechanism, however, tend to follow an opposite pattern. The author offers a preliminary interpretation of this finding. Finally, this article provides insight into how international social networks and the strength of domestic nongovernmental organizations affect ratification.

Much recent research has found that states generally comply with the treaties they sign. The implications of this finding, however, are unclear: do states comply because the legal commitment compels them to do so, or because of the conditions that led them to sign? Drawing from previous research in thisReviewon Article VIII of the IMF Treaty (Simmons 2000a), I examine the problem of selection bias in the study of treaty compliance. To understand how and whether international legal commitments affect state behavior, one must control for all sources of selection into the treaty—including those that are not directly observable. I develop a statistical method that controls for such sources of selection and find considerable evidence that the unobservable conditions that lead states to make the legal commitment to Article VIII have a notable impact on their propensity to engage in compliant behavior. The results suggest that the international legal commitment has little constraining power independent of the factors that lead states to sign.

This special issue seeks to move forward the development of an empirical research agenda that takes seriously the complexity of how international organizations (IOs) function and the need to study that complexity at all levels of analysis by using robust research tools. We advocate for a broad empirical research approach that molds and sharpens theories about IOs by conducting systematic tests in large-sample environments. Two themes create a common thread throughout this issue. First, shifting the focus from whether IOs matter to how they work requires acknowledgment of the contingency of cause and effect. A second common thread lies in the authors' treatment of IO membership as an aggregate phenomenon—that is, as a set of institutions and relationships evolving over time and with many members rather than as a single organization.