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Information Systems in Treaty Regimes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Xinyuan Dai
Xinyuan Dai
Affiliation:
University of Illinois
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Extract

One of the most influential arguments in international relations is that international institutions influence states' behavior by monitoring their compliance with treaties, which in turn facilitates reciprocity. Empirically, however, many treaty organizations are not mandated to monitor compliance. The article develops a parsimonious theoretical framework to address the empirical diversity of monitoring arrangements. By mapping strategic environments onto monitoring arrangements, it accounts for who detects noncompliance and who brings it to light. In particular, two factors—the interest alignment between noncompliance victims and their states and the availability of noncompliance victims as low-cost monitors—largely shape the organizational forms of information systems. This simple theory sheds light on a wide range of substantiveh/important treaty regimes.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 54 , Issue 4 , July 2002 , pp. 405 - 436
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 2002

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References

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10 Throughout the article, I ask how varying incentive structures give rise to observed monitoring arrangements. But I do not claim or imply that what we observe empirically are the most effective monitoring arrangements in terms of discovering all incidences of noncompliance.

11 To take advantage of low-cost monitors, states need not formally institutionalize these decentralized monitors. Neither is it necessary for these nonstate monitors to cease the pursuit of their selfinterest or independence. The relationship between nonstate monitors and treaty organizations varies, which I will discuss in more detail later with empirical examples.

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20 As McCubbins, Noll, and Weingast (fn. 19) argue, Congress's ability to apply sanctions is limited. Elsewhere, Dai (fn. 6) identifies the domestic constituency mechanism as an alternative to the logic o f carrots and sticks in interstate politics.

21 See Milgrom, Paul R., North, Douglas C., and Weingast, Barry R., “The Role of Institutions in the Revival o f Trade: The Medieval Law Merchant, Private Judges, and the Champagne Fairs,” Economics and Politics 2 (March 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cahrert, Randall L., “Rational Actors, Equilibrium, and Social Institutions,” in Knight, Jack and Sened, Itai, eds., Explaining Social Institutions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Greif, Avner, Milgrom, Paul, and Weingast, Barry R., “Coordination, Commitment, and Enforcement: The Case of the Merchant Guild,” Journal of Political Economy 102 (August 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a study of organizational forms of trade liberalization, see Yarbrough, Beth V. and Yarbrough, Robert M., Cooperation and Governance in International Trade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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24 It is important to note that the interest alignment in my theory is between noncompliance victims and their own states. A different kind of alignment—cross-country interest alignment—is possible where, for instance, state A has incentives to protect human rights victims in country X. But that is not how the interest alignment in this article is defined. Empirically, such interests of states are often derivatives of other more fundamental interests.

25 Note that the cost is defined as the extra effort by noncompliance victims in discovering whether they are being victimized and who is injuring them. A low-cost monitor is such because he may directly experience noncompliance, not because his monitoring does not cost states anything. Therefore, one cannot infer from my definition of low-cost monitors that NGOs are generally low-cost monitors amply because, from the perspective of states, their monitoring costs nothing.

26 Throughout this article, centralization refers to the degree to which monitoring tasks are carried out by treaty organizations.

27 This is consistent with some lessens from the bureaucratic agency literature: while noncompliance is often detected by fire alarms, communication of this information is often assisted by police patrol.

28 One problem that victims may face is that of collective action. By speaking out against human rights abuses, for instance, one may attract even more abuse. Thus, there may be free-riding incentives among potential victims. I will address collective action problems in the next section.

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30 Hardin (fn. 29)>52.

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36 Domestic actors who support compliance occasionally exist; the IMF, for instance, would seek out such actors in trying to influence debtor governments to reduce military spending. However, civilians interested in reducing military expenditures and the bureaucratic section competing for power against the military do not usually have the information on military spending. Rather they need the data that the IMF gets. See Chayes and Chayes (fn. 7).

37 South Africa essentially managed to keep its twenty years o f nuclear activity—leading to the bomb and eventually to nuclear dismantlement—out of the public eye. See Reiss, Mitchell, Bridled Ambition: Why Countries Constrain Their Nuclear Capabilities (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Cemer Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

38 International Atomic Energy Agency, Information Circular (INFCIRC) 153 (Vienna, 1971)Google Scholar.

39 The level of interest alignment between noncompliance victims and their states is naturally not as high in cases where victims are subnational actors as in cases where victims are states themselves. Indeed, interests between a specific group of producers and those of their government are not always aligned. This, as I mentioned in the theory section, relates to whether the government's protection of such a group conflicts with other more important subnational interests, either other business sectors or more generally the consumers. In practice, however, states often represent producers' interests more than they do consumers' interests. I will discuss the complications with interest alignment in more detail later in this section.

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43 For documentation of this phenomenon in the GATT/WTO, see Christina R. Sevilla, “Complaints and Compliance: The Politics of Enforcing GATT/WTO Rules” (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, August 29-September 1, 1996).

44 It is possible that some states may have incentives to protect human rights victims in another country. Thus, two kinds of monitoring arrangements involving states may be possible. One possibility is monitoring by treaty organizations. A major hurdle here is that, for each state, voting for a treaty organization to monitor human rights policies in other countries is at the same time voting for the same treaty organization to check on one's own human rights practice. To the extent that states may care about the former less than they want to avoid the latter, the amount of authority and resources that states are willing to delegate to such treaty organizations may be limited. The other possibility is monitoring by some states of human rights practices in other states. The United States, for instance, unilaterally does annual human rights reports on nations. This, however, does not seem representative among countries. It is also interesting to note that, even in the case where the U.S. monitors human rights policies of other states, it is usually those potential victims in these countries and NGOs who represent the interests of these potential victims—inside those countries or outside—who first detect noncompliance and bring it to light.

45 Even for the two principal treaties, the reporting record is not fully satisfactory. While 59 of 113 parties were up to date with reporting obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 46 of 116 parties were up to date under the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. See UN Secretary-General, Status of International Human Rights Instruments and the General Situation of Overdue Reports, UN Doc. HRI/MC/1992/3 (September 25, 1992)Google Scholar; Chayes and Chayes (fn. 7), 161.

46 Over 80 percent of reports due have been turned in every year of the ILO's existence, except during World War II. See Chayes and Chayes (fn. 7), 157.

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50 Chayes and Chayes (fn. 7), 254.

51 Katfaiyn Sikkink has demonstrated the importance of information networks among human rights NGOs. For instance, human rights violations in Mexico evaded international scrutiny for a long time, until NGOs both inside and outside began to document human rights abuses and together bring them to the international attention. See Sikkink, Kathryn A., “Human Rights, Principled Issue- Networks, and Sovereignty in Latin America,” International Organization 47 (Summer 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Nongovernmental Organizations, Democracy, and Human Rights in Latin America,” in Farer, Tom J., ed., Beyond Sovereignty: Collectively Defending Democracy in tie Americas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; and Denise Dresser, “Treading Lightly and without a Stick: International Actors and die Promotion of Democracy in Mexico,” in Farer.

52 George Downs, David Rocke, and Peter Barsoom make the point that the European regime is among those deep institutions; see Downs, , Rocke, , and Barsoom, , “Managing the Evolution o f Multilateralism,” International Organization 52 (Spring 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 Heffeman, Liz, “A Comparative View of Individual Petition Procedures under the European Convention on Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,” Human Rights Quarterly 19 (February 1997), 87–88Google Scholar. Arguably, one way that the strength of the European regime is translated into the effectiveness of the monitoring arrangements is via the institutionalized procedure of individual petition, which systematically utilizes and facilitates the information flow from low-cost monitors to treaty regimes. The European regime lends substantial support to the prediction of my theory: even in a resourceful regime such as the European human rights regime, it is the human rights victims who detect noncompliance and, with the enabling assistance of the treaty organization, bring that information to light. This point benefited from the comments of an anonymous reviewer.

54 Only three out o f nine environmental regimes surveyed by Jesse Ausubel and David Victor require formal reporting. See Ausubel, and Victor, , “Verification of International Environmental Agreements,” Annual Review of Energy and the Environment 17 (1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 U.S. General Accounting Office, International Environment: International Agreements Are Not Well Monitored, GAO RCED-92–43,1992 (Washington, D. C.: GAO, 1992)Google Scholar. For the unreliability of fishing data, see also M. J. Peterson, “International Fisheries Management,” in Haas, Keohane, and Levy (fc.23).

56 Ausubel and Victor (fn. 54), 20.

57 Greene, Owen, 'Ozone Depletion: Implementing and Strengthening the Montreal Protocol,” in Poole, John B. and Guthrie, Richard, eds., Verification Report 1992: Yearbook on Arms Control and Environmental Agreements (London: VERTIC, 1992).Google Scholar

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40 Marc Levy, “European Acid Rain: The Power of Tote-Board Diplomacy,” in Haas, Keohane, and Levy (m. 23).

61 For example, in 1994 the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) had an annual budget of nearly 57 million Swiss francs and a staff of more than five hundred. For another example, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) is financially supported by over five million contributors. See Lanchbery, John, “Long-Term Trends in Systems for Implementation Review in International Agreements on Fauna and Flora,” in Victor, David G., Raustiala, Kal, and Skolnikoff, Eugene B., eds., The Implementation and Effectiveness of International Environmental Commitments: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: MT Press, 1998), 65–66Google Scholar.

62 Owen Greene, “The System for Implementation Review in the Ozone Regime,” in Victor, Raustiala, and Skolnikoff (fn. 61), 183–84.

63 Chayes and Chayes (fn. 7), 164–65.

64 Raustiala, Kal, “The 'Participatory Revolution' in International Environmental Law,” Harvard Environmental Law Review 21 (Summer 1997), 561Google Scholar.

65 Mitchell (fn. 15).

66 Sachariew, Kamen, “Promoting Compliance with International Environmental Legal Standards: Reflections on Monitoring and Reporting Mechanisms,” in Handl, Gunther, ed., Yearbook of International Environmental Law (London: Graham and Trotman, 1991), 34Google Scholar.

67 Sanger, David A., “Nuclear Material Dumped off Japan,” New York Times, October 19,1993, AlGoogle Scholar.

88 Greenpeace Examiner, “One Step Closer” (Summer 1981), 8Google Scholar.

69 Greenpeace Examiner, “Taiwan Stops Whaling” (Winter 1980), 4Google Scholar.

70 Chayes and Chayes (fn. 7), 267.