Treaty Negotiation, Legitimacy, and Imitation of the Liberal Canon

• In Event: Understanding the Ties That Bind States: Institutions, Networks, and Community

Abstract

New global governance initiatives are often viewed warily by proponents of the liberal international order. These institutions may reflect revisionist states’ attempts to challenge the order and the international organizations (IOs) that serve as its backbone. But not all nascent institutions seek to upend liberal norms and authority structures. How can Western leaders and elites in existing IOs determine whether new institutions are threats or complements? We argue that the architects of new agreements often borrow treaty language from core liberal institutions — a process we term “emulation” — to signal that they are status-quo oriented rather than revisionist institutions. We develop a theory of emulation in which treaty negotiators weigh the discretion costs of recycling treaty text against the legitimacy benefits the practice can provide. We examine this process in two empirical tests. First, we analyze original data on emulation in approximately 10,000 economic treaties from 1944-2015. We show that treaty architects are most likely to emulate liberal agreements when they have a heightened demand for legitimacy among Western audiences and low to moderate discretion costs. Second, we field an elite survey experiment on officials from leading economic IOs to demonstrate that emulation reduces the perceived threat posed by new institutions and increases respondents’ willingness to cooperate with them.

Author

• Tyler Pratt, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill