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Leader ideology and state commitment to multilateral treaties

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The existing literature argues that the left is generally more supportive of multilateralism in foreign policy than the right. However, the impact of ideology on state commitment to multilateral cooperation have not yet been empirically tested adequately. We assess the presence of such a left–right divide on state commitment to multilateral treaties employing an original dataset, containing all the available information about the ratification of the multilateral treaties deposited with the UN Secretary General since 1945. Our results indicate that indeed countries led by left-wing leaders are generally faster at ratifying treaties than those led by right-wing leaders. However, the association between leader ideology and commitment to multilateral treaties is substantially conditioned by regime type and the international context. In fact, we find robust evidence of a significant gap in ratification duration between states led by left-wing and right-wing leaders in democracies but not in other regime types, and during the Cold War but not after. Through such findings, this article provides a contribution to the debate on the impact of ideology on international relations and the drivers of global support for multilateralism.
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Vol.:(0123456789)
The Review of International Organizations
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-024-09563-2
Leader ideology andstate commitment tomultilateral
treaties
ValerioVignoli1· MichalOnderco2,3
Accepted: 22 July 2024
© The Author(s) 2024
Abstract
The existing literature argues that the left is generally more supportive of multilater-
alism in foreign policy than the right. However, the impact of ideology on state com-
mitment to multilateral cooperation have not yet been empirically tested adequately.
We assess the presence of such a left–right divide on state commitment to multi-
lateral treaties employing an original dataset, containing all the available informa-
tion about the ratification of the multilateral treaties deposited with the UN Secre-
tary General since 1945. Our results indicate that indeed countries led by left-wing
leaders are generally faster at ratifying treaties than those led by right-wing leaders.
However, the association between leader ideology and commitment to multilateral
treaties is substantially conditioned by regime type and the international context. In
fact, we find robust evidence of a significant gap in ratification duration between
states led by left-wing and right-wing leaders in democracies but not in other regime
types, and during the Cold War but not after. Through such findings, this article
provides a contribution to the debate on the impact of ideology on international rela-
tions and the drivers of global support for multilateralism.
Keywords Ideology· Ratification· Multilateral treaties· Domestic politics·
Democracy· Cold War
Responsible editor: Axel Dreher
Authors’ contribution Design and conceptualization: Valerio Vignoli (25%), Michal Onderco (75%);
Statistical analysis: Valerio Vignoli (100%), Michal Onderco (0%); Writing: Valerio Vignoli (50%),
Michal Onderco (50%). The order of authors reflects the significance of authors’ contributions.
Extended author information available on the last page of the article
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V.Vignoli, M.Onderco
1 Introduction
The United States signed the Paris Agreement under the Democrat Barack
Obama, withdrew under the next administration, the Republican one of Donald
Trump, and then re-joined it under Trump’s successor Joe Biden, Obama’s former
vice president. Brazil signed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons
during the presidency of Michel Temer, but the ratification process stopped when
the far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro took over. Now, with the left-wing president
Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva in power, the ratification process is back on track and
expected to be completed soon (Presidência da República, 2023). Does leader
ideology have anything to do with states commitment to multilateral treaties?
In recent years, there has been a growing concern about the future of interna-
tional cooperation. While the number of issues requiring attention and solutions
at the supranational level is increasing, scholars and policy-makers alike have
expressed concerns about the ability to deliver international cooperation in the
future. Ratification of international treaties is of crucial importance for our under-
standing of international cooperation, as treaty-making is the preferred way of
international cooperation today and a key mechanism for commitment to address
common problems (Bernauer et al., 2010; Denemark & Hoffmann, 2008; Lan-
tis, 2008; Lupu, 2016; Milewicz & Elsig, 2014). Committing to multilateral trea-
ties usually consists of two steps: the signing of international treaties, and their
domestic ratification. However, there is often a significant period between signing
and ratifying international treaties.
One of the reasons for such delay might come from politicisation at the domes-
tic level. Scholars have argued that ratification processes “have become increas-
ingly politicized” (Lantis, 2008, p. 1). However, states are bound by the treaties
only from the moment of ratification. Drawing on the two-level game theory
approach (Putnam, 1988), scholars have also argued that negotiators need to take
into account what the domestic moods are when negotiating treaties (Bang etal.,
2012; Bernauer etal., 2010; Hug & König, 2002; König, 2005). A few studies
investigated the impact of partisanship on the treaty-ratification process in the US
(Böller, 2021; DeLaet & Scott, 2006; Kreps etal., 2018; Peake, 2017). However,
attention to the effect of ideology on treaty ratification globally has been much
more limited (Boockmann, 2006). In this article, we move this research a step
forward, addressing this literature gap.
We focus on treaty ratification as a key indicator of commitment to multilat-
eralism, as it represents a stronger test of willingness to engage in multilateral
cooperation. While signatures can signal intent, states are only legally bound
by their multilateral obligations upon ratification. States can withdraw ratifica-
tion without withdrawing their signature, indicating a decreased commitment to
multilateralism, as seen in Russia’s withdrawal from the Comprehensive Test Ban
Treaty (Arms Control Association, 2023). As Ostermann and Wagner (2023a)
note, ratification is vital for understanding domestic constraints on foreign policy
and normative commitments. Additionally, focusing on signatures rather than rat-
ification can create empirical issues in assessing state commitment, as states often
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Leader ideology andstate commitment tomultilateral treaties
commit to multilateral treaties without signing them. Accession, which is ratifica-
tion without prior signature, is common practice for states committing to multi-
lateral treaties already entered into force or signed before their independence.
Through this article, we provide a significant contribution to two distinct fields
of inquiry. On the one hand, the literature on ideology and foreign policy has rarely
considered commitment to multilateralism as an output to be explained. On the
other hand, the literature on treaty ratification has never comprehensively investi-
gated the impact of ideology. Moreover, we study whether the effect of ideology
varies across different regime types and over time. Regrettably, scholarship on ideol-
ogy and foreign policy has not yet explored such interactions. Therefore, this study
adds nuances to the established claim that “ideology matters” in international poli-
tics, highlighting “where” and “when” it matters. To test such arguments, we use a
novel dataset of multilateral treaties which covers 350 multilateral treaties deposited
with the UN Secretary General and stored in the United Nations Treaty Collection
(UNTC) since the end of the Second World War. This is the most complete dataset
on multilateral treaty ratification to date, spanning across different type of partici-
pants (states and international organizations), treaty scope (universal and regional
treaties) and issue area (e.g. disarmament, environment, human rights).
Our findings suggest that ideology matters, but not everywhere, and not all the
time. We find that, broadly speaking, states led by left-wing leaders are more com-
mitted to multilateral treaties than states led by centrist and right-wing leaders.
This finding provides evidence that individual-level differences about multilateral
cooperation between leftist and rightist translate into government-level preferences
(Rathbun, 2007). However, the effect of leader ideology is circumscribed only to
a certain type of regime and a specific period. Democracies led by left-wing lead-
ers are faster at ratifying multilateral treaties than democracies led by right-wing
leaders, but there is no significant difference between left-wing and right-wing non-
democracies. During the Cold War, left-wing led states were more committed than
right-wing led states, but such difference has become negligible afterwards.
The remainder of the article continues as follows. In the second section, we
review the state of the art on treaty ratification. Tacking stock of the debate on the
impact of ideology and partisanship on foreign policy, we then present our hypothe-
ses. In the following section, we introduce our original dataset on multilateral treaty
ratification. We subsequently describe the dependent and independent variables
included in our regression analysis. In the fifth section, we show the results of our
models and prediction about the average duration of state treaty ratification process
on the basis of leader ideology. The final section concludes the article, discussing
our empirical findings and our contribution to extant scholarship.
2 Why states ratify multilateral treaties
The question why some states ratify international treaties quickly and others more
slowly is related to the question why states join international treaties at all. Scholars
often look at international treaties as signalling devices (Baccini & Koenig-Archi-
bugi, 2014; Hugh-Jones etal., 2018). As Büthe and Milner (2008) argue, when a
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V.Vignoli, M.Onderco
state joins a treaty, it signals a certain position to the world, and treaties in this way
fulfil an informational role. Von Stein (2005) even sees a “selection bias” as signing
a treaty could be interpreted as a signal of a willingness to commit. This argument
has been broadly applied to investment and trade treaties (Bauerle Danzman, 2016;
Haftel, 2010; Peinhardt & Allee, 2012), environmental treaties (Bernauer et al.,
2010; Hugh-Jones et al., 2018), and labour standard treaties (Baccini & Koenig-
Archibugi, 2014). However, there are multiple ways in which states can use signal-
ling – they may aim to signal an association with a particular group of countries
(Long etal., 2007), but also to signal their commitment to a certain future-oriented
policy direction (Fearon, 1994; Moravcsik, 2000).
However, ratification is not to be taken for granted after signature. States some-
times do not ratify the treaties that they signed, and sometimes take a very long
time to ratify. Even if they are committed to international treaties, involuntary defec-
tion can occur, often due to domestic and international factors (Grieco etal., 2009;
Simmons, 2009). Looking at the domestic determinants of the treaty commitment,
scholarship based on two-level-game approaches (Putnam, 1988) focused on the
interplay between domestic situation and international agreements. Scholars have
often stressed that, in order to facilitate the ratification of treaties at home, the nego-
tiators need to anticipate possible domestic challenges (and challengers), and take
possible criticism into account already when designing the treaties (Hug & König,
2002; König & Hug, 2006). However, the two-level nature is also recognised in the
scholarship that focuses on the domestic politics of treaty negotiation, which looked
at particular strategies used by executives to assure ratification in legislatures, par-
ticularly in the US setting (Bang etal., 2012; Kelley & Pevehouse, 2015; Kreps
etal., 2018; Lantis, 2006; Milner & Tingley, 2015). Scholars also tried to under-
stand the effect of partisanship and ideology on the ratification process of treaties
in the United States (Böller, 2021; DeLaet & Scott, 2006; Kreps etal., 2018; Peake,
2017).1 The effects of partisanship are also reflected in public opinion (Gries, 2014;
Rathbun, 2013).
However, the attention to ideology as a factor in understanding multilateral coop-
eration on a larger sample of countries was limited (Boockmann, 2006; Schulze,
2014). In fact, there are no studies empirically testing the impact of ideology on
commitment toward multilateral treaties across different topics. This is surprising
as by now there is ample evidence that ideology generally matters in international
politics (Gries & Yam, 2020; Hofmann, 2013; Hofmann & Martill, 2021; Noël &
Thérien, 1995; Rathbun, 2004, 2007). At the same time, extant literature on the poli-
tics of foreign policy has consistently overlooked commitment to multilateral trea-
ties as an output to be explained by ideology. Some studies suggested that, broadly
speaking, leftist individuals are more prone to support multilateralism than rightist
individuals (Rathbun, 2007, 2012). However, whether such cleavage translates into
diverging foreign policy outputs or not is yet to be known. Therefore, through this
study, we fill a gap in both these strands of research.
1 Interestingly enough, a majority of these works focus on ratification of arms control agreements.
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Leader ideology andstate commitment tomultilateral treaties
Moreover, the effect of government ideology on international politics has sel-
dom been investigated spanning across the end of the Cold War and, simultane-
ously, regime types. Most of the long-term analyses on the impact of partisanship
on foreign policy concentrated on the case of United States, with contrasting evi-
dence regarding the effect of the bipartisan competition (Chaudoin etal., 2010;
Kupchan & Trubowitz, 2007). Most comparative studies instead tend to focus on
the post-Cold War period only and all of them consider the impact of ideology
only in democratic countries due to the lack of comparable data for autocratic and
developing countries (Finke, 2022; Ostermann & Wagner, 2023a, 2023b). While
we acknowledge the importance of keeping intervening variables constant and
issues in measuring ideology across different contexts, we see such analyses as
limited. Relying on a brand-new dataset categorizing leader ideology across the
world since 1945, we therefore aim to improve the understanding of the impact of
ideology on international politics.
In testing the impact of ideology on multilateral treaty ratification across regime
type and over time, we look at a broad set of treaties signed since the end of the Sec-
ond World War. The existing scholarship on the determinants of ratification has thus
far been partial at best. Existing work has focused either on a limited time period
(Elsig et al., 2011; Hugh-Jones etal., 2018); a limited geographical area (Kelley
& Pevehouse, 2015; Lantis, 2005; Peake, 2017); or a particular issue area, such as
trade (Büthe & Milner, 2008; Schneider & Urpelainen, 2013), labour rights (Baccini
& Koenig-Archibugi, 2014; Boockmann, 2006), human rights (Hafner-Burton etal.,
2008), investment (Haftel & Thompson, 2013), arms control (DeLaet & Scott, 2006;
Krepon & Caldwell, 2016) or environment (Böhmelt & Butkutė, 2018; Neumayer,
2002a, 2002b; Yamagata etal., 2017). If scholars looked into the past at the broader
set of treaties, they were interested in the joining process rather than in the ratifica-
tion process duration (Lupu, 2016). By building the largest dataset on multilateral
treaty ratification to date, we offer an empirical advancement to the research on this
issue.
3 Ideology andcommitment tomultilateral treaties
The “domestic turn in international relations” (Kaarbo, 2015) has focused the atten-
tion of scholars on the domestic factors which explain the behaviour of states in
international politics. One of the most fruitful avenues of scholarship in this stream
has been focusing on the role of political ideology in explaining particular foreign
policy choices by states.
In recent years, one way to study the impact of ideology on commitment to
multilateralism would be to focus on the role of populism in international poli-
tics. Scholars have studied how populists interact with multilateral institutions, for
instance by studying their development aid allocation (Hackenesch etal., 2022),
how they interact with international courts (Voeten, 2020) or what preferences
they have in the IMF (Carnegie etal., 2024). However, one of the conclusions
of this work is that the impact of populism is often variegated (Copelovitch &
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V.Vignoli, M.Onderco
Pevehouse, 2019).2 As populism is often seen as a thin ideology (Mudde, 2004),
impact of populism often varies by host ideology (Destradi etal., 2021). There-
fore, it makes sense to focus on other dimensions of ideology.
As Noël and Thérien (2008) argue, the left–right dimension of political ideology
remains dominant, “the most enduring and comprehensive way of mapping belief
systems” (Noël & Thérien, 2023, p. 151). It is therefore no wonder that it was found
to matter not only in domestic politics, but in foreign policy too. For instance, this
cleavage is influential in security policy, particularly in the propensity to use force
(Rathbun, 2004; Wagner, 2020). Wagner et al. (2018) show that contestation of
military operations is driven by the traditional left–right cleavage rather than “new
politics” conflicts such as “gal vs tan” (“gal” stands for green-alternative-liberal
and “tan” stands for traditional-authoritarian-nationalist). In international economic
policy, the left–right dimension unsurprisingly affects how states approach trade
(Milner & Judkins, 2004), how foreign direct investment is allocated (Pinto, 2013),
or how foreign aid is distributed (Dietrich etal., 2020; Thérien & Noel, 2000). To
sum up, scholars have demonstrated that left-wing and right-wing voters are sys-
tematically different when it comes to foreign policy (Onderco, Etienne, & Smet-
ana, 2022), that such differences are mirrored at the party level (Fonck etal., 2019;
Wagner etal., 2018) and that they are eventually translated into different foreign
policy outputs at the government level (Mello, 2012; Wagner, 2020). The left–right
distinction on foreign policy matters even in settings where this dimension is usually
not salient, such as Japan (Proksch etal., 2011). Even if the leaders might sometimes
use ideology in instrumental or strategic ways, their electorate’s views are fairly sta-
ble in reflecting left–right ideology (Noël & Thérien, 2023).
Existing work in the field of international relations indicates that left-leaning gov-
ernments are generally more cooperative in international politics. Left-wing gov-
ernments are often more attuned to international cooperation on the basis of their
roots which are often in organised labour or other popular movements. Leaders
in such parties are more likely to hold cosmopolitan views which create a moral
obligation to cooperate (Bayram, 2017). They are more likely to express and hold
views privileging community over an individual, which translates into preference
for cooperation in international affairs (Rathbun, 2007). As Rathbun argued in his
ground-breaking work, individuals leaning to the left (more liberal, using the Amer-
ican vocabulary) are more likely to trust their counterparts and show more open-
ness to international cooperation (Rathbun, 2012). Their trust towards others also
translates into lesser concern about sovereignty loss and associated sovereignty costs
(Böhmelt, 2022). Their cooperativeness extends further: left-wing governments are
more engaged in debates in the UN General Assembly (Finke, 2022) and have more
positive views of (and spend more on) development aid (Thérien & Noel, 2000).
Evidence from Anglophone democracies also shows that they are more likely to vote
similarly to other countries in the world (Hanania, 2018). By contrast, right-wing
governments are more likely to express more nationalist views, which then trans-
late into views opposed to multilateralism and multilateral cooperation (Fordham &
2 We are grateful to Reviewer 3 for suggesting us to engage with this line of inquiry.
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Leader ideology andstate commitment tomultilateral treaties
Flynn, 2023), more negative views of other countries (Gries, 2014), but also privi-
leging military spending (Wenzelburger & Böller, 2020).
In terms of treaty ratification, Boockmann (2006) shows that countries led by
left-wing governments are more likely to ratify the International Labour Organi-
zation (ILO) conventions than right-wing counterparts. To the contrary, Schulze
(2014) does not find this domestic cleavage to be relevant in determining ratification
of environmental treaties. However, as we already noted, the effect of political ideol-
ogy on treaty commitment has never been assessed comprehensively across multiple
issue areas.3 Therefore, in line with the just mentioned literature, we hypothesise
that left-wing led states are more likely to ratify multilateral treaties than right-wing
led states.
H1: States led by left-wing leaders are more committed to multilateral treaties
than states led by right-wing leaders
Scholars, especially comparative political economists focusing on neoliberalism,
have demonstrated that there are important ideological similarities between the poli-
cies pursued by neoliberal governments in democratic or non-democratic settings
(Gallo, 2021). However, most international relations scholarship would argue that
this matters more in democracies. The domestic regime type is broadly recognised
as a major factor driving the foreign policy of states (Mansfield etal., 2002; Rus-
sett & Oneal, 2001; Simmons, 1998). The academic focus on regime type has even
given rise to a major research programme, dubbed “democratic distinctiveness”
(Geis & Wagner, 2011; Owen, 2004). Scholars in this research programme have
found democracies to be more cooperative (Russett & Oneal, 2001), and when it
comes to treaty ratification, democracies are usually faster (Elsig etal., 2011). How-
ever, leaders in democracies are also more reflective of the preferences of their citi-
zens within the borders of their countries (Aldrich etal., 2006). Because leaders in
democracies need to be (re-) elected, they are more careful to reflect the preferences
of their electorate and stick to the ideological proclivities which they were elected
on (Gries & Yam, 2020; Milner & Tingley, 2015). In democracies, civil society
often advocates and lobbies in favour of ratification of certain international trea-
ties, and such lobbying is less common in non-democracies (Slaughter, 1995). Other
types of regimes feature fewer restrictions, and therefore their leaders need to worry
less about domestic veto players (Hafner-Burton etal., 2008; Vreeland, 2008). They
might sometimes opportunistically ratify treaties without a desire to comply.4 If
autocratic leaders are constrained in their exercise of the foreign policy, it is often
because of different types of players (such as other power centres within the regime),
or the general sentiment in the public opinion (Jost, 2024). Noël and Thérien (2023)
3 Vignoli and Corradi (2024) is an exception as they test the correlation between ideology and treaty
ratification in Italy after 1989.
4 This should, however, not be interpreted as arguing that parliaments do not matter for international
treaty ratification in non-democracies. Kassenova (2022), for instance, argues that Kazakh parliament
was seen as a serious veto-player for the process of ratification of a number of treaties related to the
removal of nuclear materials after the Soviet Union’s breakup.
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V.Vignoli, M.Onderco
agree that the left–right dimension matters more in democracies, but offer a different
theoretical explanation – democracies give citizens “the capabilities and possibili-
ties of making and expressing their own choices” (p. 254), building on the work of
Inglehart and Welzel (2005). On the basis of such arguments, we expect the cleav-
age between left and right on commitment to multilateral treaties to be amplified in
democratic countries.
H2: In democracies, the impact of leader ideology on the states’ commitment to
multilateral treaties is stronger than in other regime types.
Lastly, we think that the difference between governments with different ideologi-
cal proclivities declined after the end of the Cold War. Realist theories of interna-
tional cooperation argue that the international system influences the likelihood of
states to join and ratify international treaties. As argued by Kenneth Waltz (1979),
the shape of the international system influences how states behave within the sys-
tem. For Waltz, the key part of the international system is the number of great pow-
ers in it. Since the end of World War II, the international system was characterised
by the bipolarity of the Cold War and the unipolarity of the post-Cold War world.
During the Cold War, much of the international cooperation was seen through the
prism of rivalry between East and West, which soured the cooperation between the
camps (Lupu, 2016; Russett, 1966; Soo Yeon & Russett, 1996; Voeten, 2000). The
fault lines of the Cold War meant that cooperation across individual camps was dif-
ficult and structural conflict was dominant (Doyle, 1983; Krasner, 1985).
By contrast, at the end of the Cold War, international system was marked by
unipolarity, which led to the development of what Ikenberry (2009) calls “Lib-
eral Internationalism 3.0”. This was also a period of intense institutionalization,
both in terms of the scope and depth of international cooperation increased as well
(Börzel & Zürn, 2021). On the other hand, more states became involved in inter-
national negotiations where previously only a handful of countries had been active
– such as in the areas of the environment (Neumayer, 2002a, 2002b) or nuclear
non-proliferation (Onderco, 2019). The newly democratising countries were
encouraged to join the institutions of the liberal international order – which often
included signing and ratifying treaties (Cooley & Nexon, 2020; Hafner-Burton
etal., 2015). Prior work also confirmed that the end of the Cold War changed the
patterns of the ratification of global environmental treaties (Yamagata etal., 2017).
Therefore, the end of the Cold War created a pressure for multilateral engagement.
The end of the century marked also what Noël and Thérien (2008, p. 195) define
as a global “rapprochement” between the left and the right. In domestic politics,
while “the right soften[ed] its stance on market competition, individualism, and a
leaner state”, the “left [came] to terms with the legitimacy of the market, the vir-
tues of competition, and the need for efficiency”. Notably, in this period, Giddens
(1994) theorised a “third way” beyond left and right that inspired many (centre-)
leftist leaders in Western Europe, including Tony Blair in Great Britain and Ger-
hard Schröder in Germany. Such convergence towards the centre, mostly driven by
socialist parties, has found robust empirical support (Knutsen, 1998). In the context
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Leader ideology andstate commitment tomultilateral treaties
of many developing countries, the left also felt compelled to question communist
ideology and embrace the benefits of foreign investment.
In international politics, such rapprochement pivoted around a “new development
consensus”, able to combine the right’s preference for market and competition with
the left’s concern for justice (Noël & Thérien, 2008, p. 195). According to Noël and
Thérien (2008), on one hand, the United Nations realised the importance of markets
for development, and, on the other hand, Bretton Woods institutions (International
Monetary Fund and World Bank) moved away from the strict neoliberal agenda they
had pursued in the previous decades. However, this rapprochement was not lim-
ited to economic agenda. As argued by Rathbun (2004) and confirmed by Wagner
(2020), the post-Cold War period has seen a greater convergence among between
the ideological left and right also in other areas of foreign policy. For instance, the
leftist parties (and then, particularly the center-left) became similarly supportive of
the use of military force abroad compared to the right-wing parties, but for different
reasons. In yet another area of international politics, Schneider and Urpeleinen find
decreasing levels of partisan heterogeneity in preferences for development coopera-
tion since the end of the Cold War (Schneider & Urpeleinen, 2014). Drawing on this
work, we propose a more generalized hypothesis that the ideological divide between
the left and right after the end of the Cold War decreased.
H3: After the end of the Cold War, the impact of leader ideology on states’ com-
mitment to multilateral treaties decreases.
The second and third hypotheses should be conceived as a refinement of the cen-
tral argument expressed in the first hypothesis. We are convinced of the relevance of
the left–right distinction in shaping states’ foreign policy behaviour, and in particular,
commitment to multilateralism, and we deem as important to provide the first com-
prehensive test of this general pattern. Partly because of data limitations, existing
literature has failed to test the impact of ideology on foreignpolicy in a systematic
way. At the same time, we have strong reasons to think that this pattern is restricted
to democratic countries during the Cold War. Our key contribution consists exactly in
hypothesizing that the argument is valid only under certain conditions and assessing
the impact of such conditions. This does not diminish the proposition that leader ideol-
ogy is relevant for state commitment to multilateralism, it rather qualifies it, clarifying
the condition that makes it (more) relevant. To sum up, we expect that the left–right
cleavage may broadly determines our phenomenon of interest but that its impact is
decisively affected by diverging constraints for leaders across regime types and the
effects of the end of the bipolar competition between the US and Soviet Union.
4 Data
4.1 Treaties andcountries
In order to test such hypotheses, we built a dataset containing the largest amount of
information about the ratification of multilateral treaties to date. We collected these
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V.Vignoli, M.Onderco
data by scraping the United Nations Treaty Collection (UNTC) website.5 UNTC
has been for a long time considered as an authoritative source of information about
international treaty commitments. Its status can be highlighted by the fact that when
the UN started charging for the UNTC access in 2000, academics and civil society
alike rose in opposition (Alston, 2001). While there are other databases which claim
to be more comprehensive, these are not publicly accessible at the time of writing
(Acharya etal., 2023). The UNTC contains information on all treaties published and
registered by the United Nations. Given the aim of our research, we focused only on
the Multilateral Treaties Deposited with the Secretary General (MTDSG), that are
693 in total. They represent a subset of highly salient multilateral treaties and, as a
consequence, UNTC provides detailed information about them, including full text,
status, and, most importantly for us, states’ signature and ratification dates in most
cases.
Our dataset covers only those MTDSGs for which complete signature and rati-
fication dates were available, indeed. Unfortunately, this is not the case for many
treaties adopted before 1945, dating back to the League of Nations period. As a con-
sequence, we extracted only treaties signed after the end of the Second World War.
Moreover, in our data collection process, we did not report two types of MTSDGs:
Annexes and Regulations. Annexes do not require a formal act of ratification on
behalf of participants but mere application. We excluded all the 166 regulations pre-
sent in the MTSDGs as they regard one single agreement: the “Agreement concern-
ing the Adoption of Harmonized Technical United Nations Regulations for Wheeled
Vehicles, Equipment and Parts which can be Fitted and/or be Used on Wheeled
Vehicles”. In total, our dataset considers 12 types of treaties: Conventions, Agree-
ments, Treaties, Declarations, Protocols, Statutes, Treaties, Amendments, Charters,
Memoranda, Articles, and Acts.
Ultimately, the dataset covers 350 multilateral treaties. The oldest treaty
included in our dataset, the United Nations Charter, was adopted in 1945. The
most recent one, the Amendment to article 8 of the Statute of the International
Criminal Court, dates back to 2019. The difference between those adopted during
the Cold War and afterwards is not large: 199 to 149. Considering that the Cold
War period (1945–1989) was ten years longer than its aftermath (1989–2022),
these figures confirm an increase in global cooperation after the end of bipolar
competition. As already suggested, most of the studies on treaty ratification focus
on specific areas. In contrast, our dataset spans across a wide number of areas
of international cooperation. Specifically, all UNTC Chapters but one, each cor-
responding to a different issue area, are represented by at least one treaty.6 Trans-
port and Communications is the most present Chapter in our dataset, with 74
treaties. Environment comes second with 53 treaties, Human Rights third with
27. While the number of treaties belonging to the former category has decreased
5 The UNTC is available at https:// treat ies. un. org/ Pages/ Parti cipat ionSt atus. aspx? clang=_ en. Data were
scraped using the “rvest” R package in April 2022.
6 Chapter XV, “Declaration of Death of Missing Persons”, contains treaties with no info on signature
and ratification dates.
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Leader ideology andstate commitment tomultilateral treaties
after the end of the Cold War, the number of treaties of the two latter categories
of treaties has considerably increased. More disarmament treaties were adopted
after 1989 too. Summarises the distribution of the treaties sorted by UNTC Chap-
terin alphabetical order and period (Cold War/Post-Cold War) Table1.
Our dataset includes both universal and regional treaties. In total, we have 46
regional treaties (13.2%). It is worth pointing out that some of the most compre-
hensive studies on treaty commitment to date only focus on universal treaties (Elsig
etal., 2011; Lupu, 2016; Milewicz & Elsig, 2014). We further differentiate “insti-
tutional” treaties from the others. Institutional treaties are those aiming to establish
an organisation. In the dataset, there are only 22 of them (7.5%). The Agreement
Establishing the African Development Bank (1963) is an example of both a regional
and institutional treaty.
The dataset contains information on the ratification of multilateral treaties for 229
actors. 204 of them are either official UN member countries or other UN non-mem-
ber states (e.g., Palestine and the Holy See). Three countries that ceased to exist in
this period were excluded from the dataset: East Germany, Yugoslavia, and Czecho-
slovakia.7 The remaining 25 actors are Intergovernmental Organisations (IGO) such
as the European Union. Even though our current focus is only on states’ treaty com-
mitment, the inclusion of IGOs is a major empirical contribution to the debate. In
fact, to our knowledge, there is no dataset that takes them into account as partici-
pants in multilateral treaties. In total, our dataset counts 24,346 participant-treaty
observations.
The core aim of the dataset is providing detailed information on treaty ratifica-
tion. Ratification can take different forms according to the type of treaty and its rules
regarding the type of adhesion procedures. We consider ratification as equivalent to
accession and acceptance-approval. Accession is “the act whereby a state accepts the
offer or the opportunity to become party of a treaty already negotiated and signed
by other states”. For instance, new countries have resorted to it to join treaties that
came into force before their independence. Acceptance and approval are instruments
of a treaty “that have the same legal effect of ratification” that, in the practice of cer-
tain states, “are used instead of ratification when constitutional law does not require
the treaty to be ratified by the head of state”.8
Actors that, at the moment of the data scraping, neither signed nor ratified a
treaty yet are not included in the UNTC treaty tables. In contrast, actors that signed
but did not ratify an agreement are included. In total, we report 7 per cent of signed
but non-ratified treaties shows the Top 10 treaties by number of ratifications, exclud-
ing associated amendments. Notably, six out of ten treaties concern environmental
issues Table2.
Table3 lists instead the top and bottom 10 countries by number of ratifications,
respectively. In the Top 10, we see the presence of only European states. This
may be due to a bias in treaties for this area but surely reflect the high extent of
7 Data concerning the signing and ratification of the treaties for these countries is placed in the footnotes
and, consequently, cannot be scraped automatically.
8 Definitions are taken from the UNTC glossary.
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V.Vignoli, M.Onderco
commitment to multilateralism of European countries. In the bottom 10 list we find
the presence of non-independent territorial entities (such as the Cayman Islands),
recently independent countries (South Sudan), and states with a recent history of
conflict (Eritrea).
4.2 Dependent variable: Ratification duration
Our dependent variable of interest is the duration of the treaty ratification process.
However, as we just noted, states have multiple pathways to commit to multilat-
eral treaties. Therefore, we consider three different scenarios of ratification process
Table 1 Number of treaties, by UNTC Chapterand period
Chapter Cold War (%) Post-Cold War (%) Total (%)
Charter of the United Nations and Statute of the
International Court of Justice
4 (2.01) 0 (0) 4 (1.15)
Commercial Arbitration and Mediation 2 (1.01 2 (1.34) 4 (1.15)
Commodities 6 (3.02) 11 (7.38) 17 (4.89)
Disarmament 2 (1.01) 11 (7.38) 13 (3.74)
Economic and Statistics 2 (1.01) 0 (0) 2 (0.57)
Education and Culture 8 (4.02) 1 (0.67) 9 (2.59)
Declaration of Death of Missing Persons 0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0)
Environment 7 (3.52) 46 (30.46) 53 (15.14)
Fiscal Matters 2 (1.01) 0 (0) 2 (0.57)
Freedom of Information 1 (0.5) 0 (0) 1 (0.29)
Health 9 (4.52) 4 (2.68) 13 (3.74)
Human Rights 10 (5.03) 17 (11.26) 27 (7.71)
International Trade and Development 14 (7.04) 8 (5.37) 22 (6.32)
Law of Treaties 3 (1.51) 0 (0) 3 (0.86)
Law of the Sea 6 (3.02) 3 (2.01) 9 (2.59)
Maintenance Obligations 1 (0.5) 0 (0) 1 (0.29)
Miscellaneous 0 (0) 1 (0.67) 1 (0.29)
Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances 12 (6.03) 0 (0) 12 (3.45)
Navigation 13 (6.53) 3 (2.01) 16 (4.60)
Obscene Publications 4 (2.01) 0 (0) 4 (1.15)
Outer Space 2 (1.01) 0 (0) 2 (0.57)
Pacific Settlement of International Disputes 1 (0.5) 0 (0) 1 (0.29)
Penal Matters 5 (2.51) 20 (13.42) 25 (7.18)
Privileges and Immunities 12 (6.03) 1 (0.67) 13 (3.74)
Refugees and Stateless Persons 4 (2.01) 0 (0) 4 (1.15)
Status of Women 3 (1.51) 0 (0) 3 (0.86)
Telecommunications 4 (2.01) 4 (2.68) 8 (2.3)
Traffic in Persons 7 (3.52) 0 (0) 7 (2.01)
Transport and Communications 55 (27.64) 19 (12.75) 74 (21.26)
Total 199 (56.86) 151 (43.14) 350 (100)
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Leader ideology andstate commitment tomultilateral treaties
duration. In the first and more general one, we measure the time span between sig-
nature and ratification. In the second one, when a country accedes to a treaty after
the treaty has already entered into force, we calculate the ratification duration start-
ing from the moment when the treaty is open for signature to the moment when the
country accedes to it.9 In the third one, when a country accedes to a treaty already
entered into force before its emergence in the international system, we calculate the
ratification period as the interval between the moment in which the state enters the
system and the moment of accession to the treaty.10
To measure ratification duration, we move from a participant-treaty to a par-
ticipant-treaty-year unit of analysis. This way of structuring the data is only an
approximation of the real duration but allows us to deal with time-varying covari-
ates. Indeed, this is an issue in our case since country-level characteristics, such
as leader ideology and democracy, can change across the years. The occurrence
of ratification is then captured by a dichotomous variable taking value 1 in years
when the event occurs and 0 in the other years. If a country fails to ratify a treaty
Table 2 Top 10 multilateral treaties by number of ratifications
Treaty Ratifications
Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer (1987) 198
Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer (1985) 198
Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) 197
United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification in those Countries Experiencing
Serious Drought and/or Desertification, Particularly in Africa (1994)
197
Convention on Biological Diversity (1992) 197
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992) 197
Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of
Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction (1992)
194
Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (1997) 194
Constitution of the World Health Organization (1946) 193
Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (1961) 193
9 In most cases, states sign treaties at the moment of its adoption or very soon after it. Therefore, it is
appropriate to compare the first and the second scenarios. To be precise, the average time-span between
treaty adoption and signature is 377days, a little more than a year. In 67 per cent of the cases, treaty
adoption and state signature occur in the same year, meaning that there will be no difference using the
year of adoption as starting point in the counting process in the first scenario. In a further 22 per cent of
the cases, state signature follows treaty adoption by only one year.
10 As soon as they become independent and join the international system, states tend to accede to vari-
ous fundamental multilateral treaties such as the one just mentioned. Therefore, calculating the ratifica-
tion period as the time between the country’s entry into the system and the accession produces a num-
ber of extremely short intervals that have more to do with the type of treaty than with the willingness
of states to accede. However, excluding these treaty accessions would have the inevitable side effect
of reducing the number of treaties ratified by countries emerging during the time span of the analysis.
Therefore, we have decided to keep those cases in consideration.
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V.Vignoli, M.Onderco
that had previously been signed, all the observations from the year of signature
onwards take value 0. We performed three further modifications with respect
to the original dataset. First, as already suggested, we removed all international
organisations from our dataset. Second, as a consequence of the employment of a
Polity V score as a measure for democracy, all countries with fewer than 500 thou-
sand inhabitants were removed from the analysis. That leaves us with 165 coun-
tries. Third, in order to match the time-span of our measure of leader ideology, we
deleted the years after 2020.
4.3 Independent variables: Leader ideology, regime type, andCold War
In order to measure national leader ideology, we rely on the Global Leader Ideol-
ogy (GLI) dataset (Herre, 2023). This dataset classifies the ideological leanings
of political leaders annually in 182 countries from 1945 or their year of independ-
ence to 2020. We chose this source over a number of existing ones measuring the
ideological leanings of cabinets and leaders – including the similarly expert-based
Comparative Political Dataset (CPDS) (Armingeon etal., 2023) and the manifesto-
based Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) (Lehmann etal., 2023) – as it includes
a larger number of countries, democratic as well as non-democratic. This enables
us to test the impactof ideology on state commitment to multilateral treaties across
different regimes. While Herre (2023) basis the coding on the economic positions,
as we argued above, his scores represent well ideological cleavages on the broader
ideological spectrum.
We focused on variables within this dataset associated with the ideology of
national leaders rather than heads of governments. In more than 91 per cent of cases,
the two roles coincide. Notable cases in which the leaders and the head of govern-
ments are not the same person include periods of cohabitation in semi-presidential
democracies such as France, Poland, and Portugal. Herre (2023) suggests that when
the two figures differ, national leaders tend to be in charge of foreign policy while
heads of governments take care of domestic politics. For instance, this is the case
for all of the three countries mentioned above. We extracted three dichotomous
Table 3 Top 10 and bottom 10 countries by number of ratifications
Top Ratifications Bottom Ratifications
Netherlands 253 Cook Islands 47
France 242 Eritrea 43
Belgium 238 Niue 40
Finland 235 Tuvalu 40
Denmark 232 South Sudan 23
Luxembourg 230 British Virgin Islands 1
Sweden 227 Cayman Islands 1
Germany 224 Hong Kong 1
Switzerland 223 Montserrat 1
Norway 223 Turks and Caicos Islands 1
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Leader ideology andstate commitment tomultilateral treaties
variables from GLI coding, the presence of left-wing, centrist, and right-wing lead-
ers in government in a given year respectively. From such dichotomous variables,
we further elaborated a three-values discrete variable differentiating between these
alternatives.11 We consider cases of non-ideological leaders and missing information
as missing values across all four variables.12 As a consequence, two countries were
further dropped from our analysis.13
We are aware that the GLI measures are not very fine-grained. In particular,
they present two important issues for our analysis. First, the concepts of left and
right can be better captured as the two poles of an axis through a continuous vari-
able as both CPDS and CMP do. While two political leaders can be considered
as left-wing, one could be seen as more left-wing than the other one. Moreover,
executives in democracies are often composed of a coalition of parties present-
ing distinct ideological profiles. However, we find that the GLI’s dichotomous
measures of leader ideology strongly correlates with continuous CPDS cabinet
ideology measures across all OECD countries from 1960 and CMP cabinet ideol-
ogy scores weighted by party portfolio allocation across all EU countries from
1990.14 Second, a yearly-based variable cannot grasp changes in national leader-
ship during a given year as consequences of events such as elections and coups.
In particular, GLI classifies leaders in power at the end of each calendar year. In
our case, this operationalisation can generate cases of mismatches between the
leader who is in power at a given time and the one that ratifies the treaty. How-
ever, such cases are very rare. Treaty ratification occurred in a year with a change
in leader ideology only 9 per cent of the times. As a result, the amount of poten-
tially mismatched cases accounts for a mere 0.8 per cent of the total participant-
treaty-year observations.
We assess the impact of leader ideology against two major factors associated
with commitment to multilateral treaties: a country’s regime type and the end of
the Cold War. The domestic regime type is broadly recognised as a major factor
driving the foreign policy of states (Mansfield etal., 2002; Russett & Oneal, 2001;
Simmons, 1998). As already suggested, various studies show that democratic
countries are faster at ratifying multilateral treaties than non-democratic coun-
tries, which is part of the democratic distinctiveness we discussed above (Elsig
11 The percentage of leaders classified as right-wing and left-wing is considerably larger than the per-
centage of leaders classified as centrist. In the original dataset, 46 per cent of the leaders were catego-
rized as left-wing, 42 per cent as right-wing, 8 per cent as centrist.
12 In most cases, leaders classified as non-ideological are authoritarian leaders. Missing observations often
refer instead to periods when countries are occupied (post-WWII Japan) or involved in domestic conflicts (post-
Saddam’s Iraq and post-Gaddafi’s Libya). Given our theoretical expectations, it is therefore unsurprising to find
that the probability of ratification across observations with missing or non-ideological value for this variable and
ratification likelihood is one third-lower than the one with scored as non-missing or ideological (0.06 to 0,09).
13 These countries are Montenegro and Qatar.
14 For more details about the correlations between GLI, CDPS and CMP measures, see TablesA1 to A4
in the Appendix. The difference is partially explained by the occasional incongruence between head of
government and leader ideology in the GLI dataset.
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V.Vignoli, M.Onderco
etal., 2011; Hafner-Burton etal., 2015). In accordance with standard practices,
we classify countries as democracies if they are given a Polity score of 6 orlarger
in a given year.15 As we noted, at the end of the Cold War, the extent of institu-
tionalisation within the international system increased (Börzel & Zürn, 2021). As
of consequence, states tend to be more committed to multilateral treaties (Yama-
gata etal., 2017). We consider the year of the fall of the Berlin wall as the point
of departure and accordingly construct a dichotomous variable. Notably, through
these variables, we are also able to test H2 and H3, assessing how regime type and
the end of the Cold War impact the relationship between national leader ideology
and ratification duration.16
4.4 Control variables
We assess the impact of leader ideology on state commitment to multilateral trea-
ties across different regime types and changes in the structure of the international
system, controlling for a series of characteristics associated with both states and
the treaties under investigation. We check for the impact of the following state-
level factors: security situation, leadership change, parliamentary involvement,
and major power status. A country’s security situation is measured in terms of the
number of inter-state rivalries in which it is involved. Existing scholarship dem-
onstrates that states engaged in international rivalries tend to be ruled by hawkish
leaders (Colaresi, 2004). Such leaders might be less interested in international coop-
eration, because they often perceive others as trying to exploit them and are less
trusting (Wagner and Onderco, 2014). We elaborated a discrete measure of yearly
inter-state rivalries on the basis of the Peace Data (Diehl etal., 2021). In addition,
through a dichotomous variable, we take into account the effect of leadership ideo-
logical change. We expect that changes in leadership ideology reduce the likelihood
of treaty ratification for two reasons. First, the incoming leader may want to focus
first on his/her own domestic agenda rather than taking care of foreign policy which
is comparatively less salient. Second, the new leader has incentives not to ratify a
treaty signed by his/her predecessor to mark a distance from him/her. Moreover, we
expect that countries where the parliament is involved in the process take longer
to ratify treaties than countries in which the executive power is the only actor in
charge. We differentiate such cases through a dichotomous variable extracted from
15 We reduced the 20-point Polity scale into a dichotomous variable as the literature suggests that
democracies are significantly more cooperative than other regime types (Russett and Oneal, 2001). Such
rationale underlies our preference for Polity scores over the equally (if not more) popular among political
scientists V-Dem indices. In fact, V-Dem high-level democracy indices do not have established thresh-
olds for differentiating democracies and non-democracies. Furthermore, the use of a dichotomous vari-
able facilitates the readability and interpretability of findings associated with interaction terms. Polity V
data spans only until 2018 and were extended to 2020 by the authors.
16 There is a strong and significant association between state regime type and the Cold War. The percent-
age of observations for democracies moves from 33% during the Cold War to 56% afterwards. In any
case, we believe it is important to include both in the models for theoretical reasons. Furthermore, we
expect them to have an opposite effect on the relationship between leader ideology and the commitment
to multilateral treaties.
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Leader ideology andstate commitment tomultilateral treaties
the Comparative Constitution Project (Elkins & Ginsburg, 2022). Importantly, we
find that the parliamentary procedures for ratification in democracies and non-
democracies do not vary significantly: parliament is involved in treaty ratification
in 74 per cent of democracies, and 72 per cent of non-democracies. In addition, we
take into account major power status as a reflection of the realist considerations that
the more powerful states are less likely to be willing to be bound by international
organisations (Mearsheimer, 1994). We consider as major powers all the countries
holding a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
In addition, we control for the effect of various types of treaties and ratification
procedures. We distinguish regional and institutional treaties from other treaties as
we expect them to foster higher state commitment. Treaty commitment is presumed
to be easier to achieve at the regional level where countries have more similar pref-
erences and interests. Countries are also presumed to be quicker in committing to
“institutional” treaties as their support is needed to help the institution actually set
up and function. Protocols and amendments are also expected to attract a higher
extent of commitment. Therefore, we use a couple of dichotomous variables to dif-
ferentiate them from the other treaties. Protocols often allow states to use a proce-
dure called “definitive signature”, whereby they express their consent to be bound
by the treaty without need for ratification. This is presumed to decrease the duration
of the ratification process. Amendments are formal alterations of the provisions of
an existing treaty. Therefore, we expect that states that committed to the original
treaty will be likely to commit to the amendment too, reducing the duration of the
ratification process. As far as ratification procedures are concerned, we control for
accession, that is, joining an international treaty after it has come into force and
when the two-step process is no longer possible. We should therefore expect acces-
sions to be associated with lower commitment. Nevertheless, as we said, we also
consider cases in which a state – directly upon its emergence as an independent state
– accedes to an existing treaty. Therefore, controlling for accessions also enables us
to distinguish between signatory parties and non-signatory parties.17
5 Empirical analysis
As already suggested, we employ event history analysis as a method to test our
hypotheses. Event history models allow the researcher to investigate the timing of
political change (Box-Steffensmeier & Jones, 2004). In other words, not only do
these models permit us to explain the likelihood of observing an event but also the
duration of the process associated with the event. For this reason, event history anal-
ysis appears as a particularly fitting method to examine ratification in multilateral
treaties. Among the various event history models, we rely on the Weibull model for
the estimation. This model is parametric as it assumes the presence of a relationship
between time and the likelihood that the event under study occurs (Box-Steffens-
meier & Jones, 2004). In particular, it assumes this relationship to be monotonic:
17 For a description of all of the variables, see TableA5 in the Appendix.
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V.Vignoli, M.Onderco
the likelihood of observing the event either increases or decreases over time. In our
case, we have strong reasons to believe that a relationship between the probability
of observing treaty ratification and the duration of the process leading to it is mono-
tonic too. In fact, although a certain amount of time is required for a state to ratify a
treaty, longer periods are usually evidence of lack of commitment.18
As to test our hypotheses, we ran six Weibull models with clustered standard error
by country-treaty: Models 1 to 4 test the individual impact of leader ideology through
our four different measures, while Models 5 and 6 test the interactions between leader
ideology and regime type and the post-Cold War period respectively. Figure1 reports
the effect of our independent variables on the likelihood of ratification, expressed in
hazard ratio (the exponential of the coefficient) with 95% confidence intervals: a value
higher than 1 means that an increase in the independent variable increases ratification
likelihood (shorter ratification process), a value lower than 1 means that an increase in
the independent variable decreases ratification likelihood (longer ratification process).
The effect is quantified in percentage points as the distance from 1.
We replicated these models across four different sub-samples: non-democracies,
democracies, Cold War, post-Cold War to have a better sense of the results. In addi-
tion, we replicated Model 1 across four further sub-samples: democracies during
the Cold War, democracies after the Cold War, non-democracies during the Cold
War, non-democracies after the Cold War. Furthermore, we replicated Model 5 and
Model 6 using dichotomous measures of leader ideology. Moreover, we conducted a
series of robustness checks on these models to check that our results are not sensitive
to the removal of relevant controls that would nonetheless generate a considerable
number of missing observations (including states’ Trade Openness, GDP per capita,
and membership in IGOs), biases in our dependent variable (removing potentially
mismatched observations), changes in the selection of our key independent variable
(by using head of government ideology measure or alternatively CMP weighted ide-
ological scores or using a binary variable computed from V-Dem-s Regime of the
World scale instead of the Polity V measure of democracy), model selection (using
Cox Proportional Hazard), and differences across treaty areas (applying clustered
standard error by Chapter). In particular, through this last robustness check, we
empirically demonstrate that leader ideology has a significant impact on multilateral
treaty commitment across multiple treaty areas.19
18 Most of the literature on event history analysis suggests treating time dependence as a nuisance
and, consequently, employs the Cox Proportional Hazard model (Box-Steffenmeier and Jones, 2004).
However, the relationship between treaty ratification and time is particularly strong in our case, as the
Kaplan–Meier curve in FigureA1in the Appendix shows. After only six years, ratification likelihood
drops to 50 per cent. An examination of measures of fit in our main models further validates our choice
of the Weibull model over the Cox model: AIC and BIC estimates are almost 6 times smaller using the
Weibull model. This indicates that this model is more suited to capture the variance in our data. The AIC
and BIC estimates are instead slightly lower using Gompertz and Gamma distribution compared to the
Weibull distribution. However, the Weibull is more generalizable than the Gompertz model and produce
much better estimates than the Gamma model. For a comparison of AIC and BIC estimates across para-
metric and monotonic survival models, see TableA6 in the Appendix.
19 For the main models, the replications across subsamples and the robustness checks, see TablesA7to
A20 in the Appendix.
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Leader ideology andstate commitment tomultilateral treaties
Model 1 shows that an increase in our three-point leader ideology scale corresponds
to a significant 3.3 per cent decrease in the likelihood of ratification. This result suggests
that, as expected in H1, states led by left-wing leaders are on average faster at ratifying
multilateral treaties than states led by centrist leaders that, in turn, are faster than states
led by right-wing leaders. Models 2 to 4 confirm the presence of a slight left–right divide
on commitment to multilateral treaties. In fact, our dichotomous variables for left-wing
and right-wing leaders have a different but equally significant impact on ratification like-
lihood. States led by left-wing leaders are 5.9 per cent more likely to ratify multilateral
treaties than states led by centrist and right-wing leaders. States led by right-wing leaders
are similarly less likely to ratify multilateral treaties than states led by centrist and left-
wing leaders. Our dichotomous variable for centrist leaders has a positive but non-signif-
icant impact. Therefore, states led by centrist leaders are not significantly different from
states led by left-wing and right-wing leaders when it comes to commitment to multi-
lateral treaties. This further reinforces the idea of the presence of a left–right divide on
commitment to multilateral treaties, rather than a cleavage between states led by centrist
leaders on one side and states led by left-wing and right-wing leaders on the other side.
Notably, across all the main Models, both variables measuring the impact of
regime type and Cold War have a strongly positive and significant impact on rati-
fication likelihood.20 Democratic countries are around 18 per cent more likely to
Left-right
Left
Center
Right
Democracy
Post-Cold War
Left-right*Democracy
L
eft-right*Post-Cold War
.9 1 1.1 1.2 1.3
Hazard Ratio
Model 1Model 2
Model 3Model 4
Model 5Model 6
Fig. 1 Effect of leader ideology, regime type, and Cold War on ratification likelihood
20 Various factors listed as controls significantly determine the commitment to multilateral treaties in
the predicted direction. The number of inter-state rivalries and parliamentary involvement are associ-
ated with longer ratification processes. Institutional treaties, protocols, and especially amendments draw
a higher extent of commitment among states. In contrast with our expectations, major powers are faster at
ratifying treaties than the other countries.
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V.Vignoli, M.Onderco
ratify treaties than non-democratic countries. After the end of the Cold War, states
were 17 per cent more likely to ratify multilateral treaties. In other words, in line
with extant scholarship, we find that the duration of ratification process is shorter
in democracies and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The hazard ratio for the inter-
action term in Model 5 indicates that the impact of leader ideology measured on a
left–right scale is magnified by 3.2 per cent in democratic countries. In other words,
as expected by H2, in democracies, the gap between states led by left-wing leaders
and states led by right-wing leaders is significantly larger when it comes to commit-
ment to multilateral treaties is larger.21 Conversely, the hazard ratio for the interac-
tion term in Model 6 shows that the effect of leader ideology is significantly moder-
ated by the end of the Cold War by 8.1 per cent. To put it bluntly, after the fall of the
Berlin Wall, being led by a left-wing, centrist, or right-wing leader was less relevant
in determining commitment to multilateral treaties.22
In order to better describe the impact of leader ideology on commitment to multi-
lateral treaties, we estimated the predicted duration of ratification process for countries
led by left-wing, centrist, and right-wing leaders across regime types and time.23 Fig-
ure2 reports the average duration of ratification process in years for states led by left-
wing, centrist, and right-wing leaders on the basis of Model 1 with 95% confidence
intervals. This plot further demonstrates that, as predicted by our first hypothesis (H1),
leader ideology has a slight but statistically significant impact on the duration of multi-
lateral treaties ratification process. In fact, states led by left-wing leaders take on aver-
age 6.90years to ratify multilateral treaties, while states led by centrist leaders take
7.15years and states led by right-wing leaders take 7.4years.
Figure3 makes a step further, describing how the predicted duration of multilat-
eral treaty ratification changes across states led by left-wing, centrist, and right-wing
leaders, conditioned on the state regime type (non-democracy versusdemocracy)
21 In the replication of the models on the sample containing only non-democracies (Table A8), the
left–right variable has no significant impact. Curiously, centrist-led are 40 per cent more likely to ratify
multilateral treaties than the other ones. In the replication of the models on the sample containing only
democracies (TableA9), the negative effect of an increase in our left–right variable on ratification likeli-
hood rises to 4.6 per cent. Democracies led by left-wing leaders are 10.5 per cent more likely to ratify
international treaties than democracies led by centrist and right-wing counterparts. The moderating effect
of the end of the Cold War rises up to almost 17 per cent.
22 In the replication of the models on the Cold War years sample (TableA10), the negative effect of an
increase in our left–right variable on ratification likelihood leaps up to 8.7 per cent. During the Cold
War, states led by left-wing leaders were 17.5 per cent more likely to ratify treaties. Democracy widened
the ideological divide by 11.4 per cent. After the end of the Cold War (TableA11), none of our ideologi-
cal variables has a statistically significant impact on multilateral treaties ratification likelihood. The rep-
lication of Model 1 across the four subsamples (TableA12) shows us instead that the mediating impact
of the end of the Cold War is more relevant than the amplifying factor of democracies. In fact, the impact
of leadership ideology is significant for both democracies (15.4 per cent likelihood decrease) and non-
democracies (4 per cent likelihood decrease) during the Cold War and turn non-significant afterwards.
Finally, the replication of the interaction model (TableA13) suggests how left-wing cabinets stand apart
from the other ones in terms of ratification commitment. In fact, the effect interacting democracy in this
case jumps to 10 per cent and the ones of Cold War to 12 per cent.
23 The predicted duration takes into account cases of non-ratification too. Therefore, we expect the real
duration of the process to be slightly shorter.
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Leader ideology andstate commitment tomultilateral treaties
6.8 7 7.2 7.4 7.6
Left Center Ri
g
ht
Fig. 2 Predicted duration of multilateral treaty ratification process conditioned to leader ideology
6 6.5 7 7.5 8 8.
5
Non-democracies Democracies
6.5 7 7.5 8 8.5 9
Cold War Post-Cold War
Left Center
Right
Fig. 3 Predicted duration of multilateral treaty ratification process conditioned to leader ideology across
regime types (left) and during/after the Cold war (right)
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V.Vignoli, M.Onderco
and the period (Cold War versus its aftermath). The estimates for the predicted dura-
tion in years are based on the interaction terms in Models 5 and 6 and have 95% con-
fidence intervals. Before commenting on such interactions, it is worth pointing out
again how regime type and the end of the Cold War individually affect the length of
the ratification process. The plot of the left shows that all democracies, irrespective
of the leadership ideological leaning, takes significantly less time to ratify multilat-
eral treaties than non-democracies. The plot on the right instead further underlines
that, during the Cold War, states were significantly slower at ratifying treaties.
The plot on the left also shows that the impact of leader ideology on the duration
of ratification process is significantly stronger in democratic states than in non-dem-
ocratic counterparts. In non-democracies there is basically no difference between
left-wing, centrist, and right-wing leaderships: they all take around a little less than
8years on average and there is consistent overlap between the confidence intervals.
The impact of leadership ideology is much more evident in democracies: states led
by left-wing leaders take on average 6.2years, states led by centrist leaders take
6.5years, and, finally, states led by right-wing leaders take almost 6.9years. To sum
up, this further confirms our second expectation (H2) about the amplifying effect of
democracy on the impact of leader ideology on commitment to multilateral treaties.
More precisely, this plot rectifies our argument by showing that there is a significant
left–right gap only in democracies.
The plot on the right further highlights that, after the end of the Cold War, the
effect of leader ideology on the duration of ratification process shrunk. During
the Cold War years, countries led by left-wing leaders took on average 7.2years
to ratify a treaty: 0.7 less than countries led by centrist leaders and 1.4years less
than countries led by right-wing leaders. The impact of leader ideology on commit-
ment to multilateralism totally disappears in the post-Cold War period. As the plot
shows, after the end of the Cold War, whether a country is led by a leftist, centrist,
or rightist leader does not matter at all, as the confidence intervals are completely
overlapped. This provides further evidence in favour of our third hypothesis (H3),
arguing that the end of the Cold War has decreased the impact of leader ideology on
states commitment to multilateral treaties. The impact has decreased to a point that
we can argue that the left–right divide on commitment to multilateral treaties existed
only during the Cold War. It has to be pointed out that the conditioning impact of
international context is larger than that of regime type. In other words, the Cold War
pushed left and right-led states to be significantly different in terms of commitment
to multilateral treaties irrespective of their regimes, while regime type did not have
the same homogeneous effect over changes in the international context.
Finally, Fig.4 shows the impact of leader ideology on the duration of ratification pro-
cess in democracies (top) and non-democracies (bottom) across decades, enabling to
grasp the impact of regime type and Cold War in a more detailed way.24 First of all, these
plots indicates how, after the 1940s, when many foundational treaties for international
cooperation were ratified, the level of commitment progressively decreased during the
24 For the corresponding models and the model pulling together democracies and non-democracies, see
TableA21 in the Appendix.
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Leader ideology andstate commitment tomultilateral treaties
Cold War only to increase again in the 1990s. Interestingly, the duration of ratification
process of multilateral treaties seems to have slightly rose again in the most recent dec-
ade. Thefigure also confirms that generally democracies tend to be faster ratifiers than
non-democracies. In addition, the top graph shows the presence of a significant left–right
divide across all the Cold War decades among democracies. This gap was more pro-
nounced in the 1960s – when left-wing democratic leaders took only 5.5years to ratify
multilateral treaties, 1.3years fewer than centrist counterparts, and almost 3years fewer
than right-wing counterparts – and in the 1980s – when left-wing democratic leaders
took 7.3years, 1.2years less than their centrist counterparts, and 2.6 less than their right-
wing counterparts. From the 1990s onwards, such differences became negligible. The
bottom graph points to the fact that the ideological divide was much more limited for
non-democracies across all decades. The 1960s is again an exceptional decade as coun-
tries led by left-wing autocrats were considerably faster at ratifying treaties than coun-
tries led by right-wing autocrats (6 against 9years on average).
6 Conclusion
In this article, we looked at the effect of leader ideology on commitment to mul-
tilateral treaties by studying the ratification of international treaties since the
end of the Second World War. Our results indicate that states led by left-wing
leaders are significantly faster at ratifying multilateral treaties than states led by
2 4 6 8 10 12
40s 50s 60s 70s 80s 90s 00s 10s
Democracies
2 4 6 8 1012
40s 50s 60s 70s 80s 90s 00s 10s
Non-democracies
Left Center
Right
Fig. 4 Predicted duration of multilateral treaty ratification process conditioned to leader ideology across
decades, in democracies (top) and non-democracies (bottom)
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V.Vignoli, M.Onderco
(more) right-wing counterparts. However, the impact of left–right dimension
is considerably conditioned by regime type and changes in the structure of the
international system. In fact, this divide is present in democratic states but not
in non-democratic states and during the Cold War but not in its aftermath. To
put it bluntly, left-wing led countries are more multilateralist than right-wing led
countries but not everywhere, not all the time. Through such findings, we contrib-
ute to the understanding of the determinants of commitment towards multilateral
treaties and the impact of ideology on international politics. In addition, we offer
an empirical contribution to the research on multilateralism, compiling the most
comprehensive dataset on multilateral treaty ratification to date. It includes a far
larger number of participants and treaties than existing ones.
Our findings have important implications for three strands of scholarship.
Scholars of the “domestic turn” will find here suitable evidence that ideology and
partisanship matter in yet another dimension of international politics – commit-
ment to multilateral treaties. The results of the empirical analysis indicate that
domestic politics matters for commitment to multilateralism. Furthermore, the
finding providing a more nuanced understanding on where and when ideology
matters is a useful contribution to this scholarship. Nevertheless, the fact that the
differences between left and right disappear after the end of the Cold War high-
lights the need to broaden the existing empirical work. This result also runs con-
trary to some other works, which recently argued that the Cold War was a rare
period of bipartisanship, and that partisan contestation of foreign policy actu-
ally increased after its end (Wagner, 2020). Notwithstanding the emergent narra-
tive that the extent of partisan polarisation in foreign policy might be overstated
(Bryan & Tama, 2022; Tama, 2024), we think that future scholarship must con-
tinue to scrutinise the extent of the effect of ideology and polarisation on foreign
policy. Future scholarship might, for instance, find that there are varying effects
depending on particular treaty types or particular characteristics of states. Some
emerging work, for instance, finds that right-wing populist parties are less sup-
portive of treaty ratification in certain particular national contexts in Central
Europe (Stankova, 2024).
Secondly, scholars of international order will find here another argument for
the qualitative change that happened in global politics after the end of the Cold
War, in the era of US hegemony (Clark, 2011; Cooley & Nexon, 2020; Eilstrup-
Sangiovanni & Hofmann, 2020). In particular, we find that this is a period of
increasing cooperation among countries, and lessening differences between dif-
ferent domestic political systems and regimes. A similar finding was recently
presented by Erik Voeten (2021), but our work demonstrates that the qualitative
change in the international system goes beyond UN voting. In particular, we show
that the importance of ideology declined after the end of the Cold War. At least
when it comes to multilateralism, international politics after the end of the Cold
War became depoliticized. The difference between the left-wing governments and
others became negligible, regardless of the regime type. This was in stark differ-
ence to the period during the Cold War. Our findings therefore provide further
evidence of the unusual “unipolar moment” after the end of the Cold War.
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Leader ideology andstate commitment tomultilateral treaties
Thirdly and lastly, our findings contribute to the scholarship on systemic versus
domestic sources of global governance (Bernauer etal., 2010). It added a further
piece of evidence demonstrating that domestic politics, namely leader ideology,
matters for global governance. Importantly, our article was one of the first ones
that looked at the effect of the ideology beyond a subset of rich, democratic, mostly
Western countries. Admittedly, our study contributed with a rather broad approach,
employing only a raw measure of ideology. Future scholarship should study how
partisanship and ideology influence other areas of multilateral global governance,
providing further insights on how to facilitate international multilateral cooperation.
For instance, future research might explore whether the rising ratification duration in
the 2010s might be linked to the global populist wave. Studies looking at local set-
tings, looking for instance at the dynamics of ratification process within individual
countries or their groups could help us to understand the interplay between ideology
and multilateralism at the micro level.
Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https:// doi.
org/ 10. 1007/ s11558- 024- 09563-2.
Acknowledgements We thank the RIO Editor and the four excellent reviewers for their constructive
feedback which helped us to improve the paper. Earlier drafts of this paper were presented at the Peace
Research Centre Prague and at the 2023 Annual Conference of the European Political Science Associa-
tion. We thank the participants of these meetings, as well as Fabio Franchino, Stephen Herzog, Benjamin
Martill, Patrick Mello, Michal Parizek, Andrea Ruggeri, Matias Spektor, and Wolfgang Wagner for their
advice in drafting this paper, and Hannah van den Brink for her research assistance. All errors remain our
own. This project was supported by the Charles University grant UNCE 24/SSH/018 (Peace Research
Center Prague II).
Data availability The dataset as well as all replication files will be made available on the journal’s web-
site upon acceptance.
Declarations
Conflict of interest The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License,
which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long
as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative
Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this
article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line
to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended
use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permis-
sion directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/.
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Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.
Authors and Aliations
ValerioVignoli1· MichalOnderco2,3
* Michal Onderco
onderco@essb.eur.nl
Valerio Vignoli
Valerio.Vignoli@unifi.it
1 Department ofSocial andPolitical Sciences, University ofFlorence, Via Delle Pandette, 32,
50127Florence, Italy
2 Department ofPublic Administration & Sociology, Erasmus University Rotterdam,
Burgemeester Oudlaan 50, 3000DRRotterdam, TheNetherlands
3 Faculty ofSocial Sciences, Peace Research Center Prague, Charles University Prague,
15800Prague, CzechRepublic
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