Domestic political incentives and international negotiations: How do electoral institutions affect leader performance

My dissertation compares the influence of regimes, electoral systems, and types of opposition (on the grounds of economic costs or security concerns or complexity of agreements) to the legislative ratification of international negotiated agreements. I posit that if ratification for an agreement is an electoral objective for the leader, then the legislative opposition, what I call the resistance, has to be overcome in some way. I argue that referendums are an alternative method to legislative deals made by the political leader to obtaining majority support. The first main contribution is the Referendum Game which uses principal-agent modeling of the response of the leader corresponding to the legislative resistance, and the prevailing offers to the other negotiating party. The second contribution of the study is the statistical testing of this theory on three separate datasets (two constructed for this purpose) detailing cases of international negotiations and the domestic institutional dynamics. The three issue areas are Territorial Disputes, Foreign Direct Investment, and Sovereign Debt. The results of the maximum likelihood analysis reveals (1) Leaders of democracies will be more in favor of legislative approval than leaders of autocracies, who will prefer referendums, (2) Proportional representation systems will not be more conducive to referendums than plurality/majority systems, (3) Complexity of agreements (measuring difficulty of negotiating) bring about more legislative approvals and referendums, and (4) Economic factors have the stronger effects on what leaders will do in sovereign debt ratifications than in territorial disputes and FDI deals, where national security concerns take center-stage. The electoral incentives of referendums is also emphasized, presenting referendums as an alternative which the leader can use to demonstrate his performance in office. The empirical models complement the Referendum Game and present evidence supporting the importance of legislative oppositions to a leader's methods of gaining domestic approvals for international agreements he/she negotiates. The study concludes that referendums can be rational for a political leader seeking to obtain electoral support for negotiated deals that serve as demonstrable accomplishments for re-election.