Averell Schmidt’s research while affiliated with John F. Kennedy University and other places

What is this page?


This page lists works of an author who doesn't have a ResearchGate profile or hasn't added the works to their profile yet. It is automatically generated from public (personal) data to further our legitimate goal of comprehensive and accurate scientific recordkeeping. If you are this author and want this page removed, please let us know.

Publications (2)


Withdrawing State Behavior and Preferences Before and After Unilateral Exit, 1945–2018. Left: Average number of multilateral treaty ratifications per year by withdrawing states before and after exit. Right: Average UNGA voting ideal point of withdrawing states each year before and after exit. The shaded region in each plot represents the post-withdrawal period. Grey dashed lines are point-wise 95% confidence intervals
Illustration of Research Design. Depiction of research design applied to three hypothetical treaty regimes with eight states. Regime A has five member states, denoted by shaded gray segments, in the pre-withdrawal period t = −1. In period t = 0, one state withdraws from Regime A, denoted by the blue segment; Regime A is, therefore, treated directly. The exiting state is also a member of Regime B, as shown by the blue-outlined grey segment in period t = 0. This regime is treated indirectly. The withdrawing state is not a party to Regimes C, as shown by the blue-outlined white segment. Regime C is untreated. The right column illustrates the measurement of overlap. The four remaining members of Regime A at t = 0 are orange; these states are outlined in orange in the other regimes. Overlap equals the percent of a regime’s membership circled in orange; average overlap is used in years with multiple withdrawals
Parallel Trends and Covariate Balance. Horizontal lines are the standardized mean difference between treated and untreated regimes for covariates (dashed grey lines) and outcomes (black lines) in the three years before withdrawal. The top row provides differences before and after refinement for regimes directly affected by exit. The bottom row presents differences for regimes indirectly affected by exit. Black dashed lines equal to no difference are provided for reference
Direct Effect of Withdrawal on Reform, 1945–2018. Difference-in-differences estimates of the direct effect of unilateral exit are presented in the shaded region. Placebo estimates are presented in the unshaded region. Thin bars are 95% block-bootstrap confidence intervals; thick bars are 90% confidence intervals
Direct Effect of Withdrawal on Reform by Power of Exiting State, 1945–2018. Analyses are grouped by the power of the withdrawing state. Plots are otherwise the same as those presented in Fig. 4

+2

Treaty withdrawal and the development of international law
  • Article
  • Publisher preview available

June 2024

·

50 Reads

·

4 Citations

The Review of International Organizations

Averell Schmidt

I argue that treaty withdrawal has two opposing effects on the development of international law. First, it directly impacts the treaty where it occurs by pushing the remaining members to adopt reforms to maintain cooperation. Second, it indirectly affects the development of other treaties by damaging diplomatic relations between the withdrawing state and other members, hindering negotiations in other areas of cooperation. Consequentially, treaty withdrawal has a mixed impact on the development of international law: it expedites the reform of one treaty while inhibiting reform elsewhere. I test this argument by applying a difference-in-differences design to an original panel of treaties built from the records of the United Nations. My findings reveal that while withdrawal increases the number of reforms in treaties where it occurs, it decreases reforms in similar treaties with comparable memberships. The indirect effect more than cancels out the direct effect. Overall, treaty withdrawal impedes the creation of new international laws.

View access options

Damaged Relations: How Treaty Withdrawal Impacts International Cooperation

August 2023

·

31 Reads

·

3 Citations

American Journal of Political Science

This article examines how treaty withdrawal affects international cooperation. By terminating its treaty commitments, the exiting state could earn a reputation for unreliability, making other states less willing to cooperate with it. However, states’ reactions to withdrawal vary markedly, even though it is public behavior. I develop an experiential theory of international cooperation that explains this variation. I argue that withdrawal damages the exiting state's relations with other treaty members, causing them to ratify fewer agreements with it in the future. I test this theory using an original data set of all treaties registered with the United Nations and a case study of France's exit from NATO's Status of Forces Agreement. I find that withdrawal reduces treaty members’ ratification of agreements with the exiting state by 7.9% in the 7 years after exit. This effect increases with the salience and material cost of withdrawal and can spill across issue areas.

Citations (2)


... Contestation from highly dissatisfied and materially powerful member states poses a significant challenge to institutional institutions. It threatens to harm the viability and legitimacy of contested institutions and may even lead to their decline and 'death' (Eckhard, Patz and Schmidt 2018;Eilstrup-Sangiovanni 2018;Deitelhoff and Zimmermann 2019;Debre and Dijkstra 2020;Hirschmann 2021;Sommerer et al. 2022;Dijkstra, Debre and Heinkelmann-Wild 2024;Gray 2024;Panke, Grundsfeld and Tverskoi 2024a;Schmidt 2024;Dijkstra et al. 2025). ...

Reference:

How negative institutional power moderates contestation: Explaining dissatisfied powers’ strategies towards international institutions
Treaty withdrawal and the development of international law

The Review of International Organizations

... For instance, Brazil and India forged developing country coalitions that in the 2000s and 2010s undermined rule-and decision-making at the ministerial conferences of the World Trade Organization (WTO) out of dissatisfaction with their limited say in the institution , while China set up competing institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) to challenge the dominance of the Bretton Woods institutions (Qian, Vreeland and Zhao 2023). Some dissatisfied powers also opt to exit international institutions (Borzyskowski and Vabulas 2019Schmidt 2023). For instance, the Bush Administration withdrew the US from the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, and the UK left the EU. ...

Damaged Relations: How Treaty Withdrawal Impacts International Cooperation
  • Citing Article
  • August 2023

American Journal of Political Science