13:15 - 15:30
Thursday-Panel
Chair/s:
Clara Brandi
Discussant/s:
Timon Forster
Meeting Room C

Silvana Tarlea, Florian Weiler
Do authoritarian regimes and democracies cooperate differently? Evidence from WTO negotiations.

Clara Brandi
Trade Effects of Environmental Agreements: Uncovering De Facto Environmental Clubs

Iasmin Goes, Terrence Chapman
Surveil and Advise: Do Article IV Consultations Improve Natural Resource Governance?
Do authoritarian regimes and democracies cooperate differently? Evidence from WTO negotiations.
Silvana Tarlea 1, Florian Weiler 2
1 University of Basel
2 Central European University

Countries seem unable to agree on how international trade should be reformed. International trade negotiations are making headlines across the world in Europe, the United States and China. In this paper we are seeking to explain what makes countries more likely to cooperate in the World Trade Organization (WTO). Specifically, we investigate how the democratic status of two countries in a dyad, as well as their trade relationship influence how closely they cooperate, and whether the interaction between these two explanatory factors is able to provide more insights. In order to investigate this question, we analyse documents submitted by individuals or groups of WTO members between 2000 and 2012 in the Doha rounds negotiations. We code 1567 documents submitted on eight negotiation issues: agriculture, development, environment, intellectual property, non-agricultural market access, services, trade facilitation, and WTO rules. We then run hurdle models for overall cooperation and the eight issues, with the first stage (selection stage) capturing who cooperates with whom, and the second stage (allocation stage) modelling the amount of cooperation observed between dyads. We expect countries with similar regime types and dyads with higher trade flows to be more cooperative, and that these two effects reinforce each other.