Abstract Most trade agreements are ratified with overwhelming support by legislators throughout the world. This lack of opposition is surprising given strong distributional consequences and expectation conventional political economy theory that parliamentary votes on policy should be closely contested between winners losers globalization. To analyze driving forces behind legislators’ voting beh...

This paper examines how the European Union's good governance initiatives under its sustainable development agenda affect ratification of Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) with African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) countries. The theoretical framework argues that likelihood is influenced by adjustment costs a signatory faces in implementing EPA provisions. We focus on level corruption as in...

This paper provides a novel understanding of delays in reaching agreements based on the idea of strategic uncertainty—i.e., the idea that a Bargainer may face uncertainty about her opponent’s play, even if there is no uncertainty about the structure of the game. It considers a particular form of strategic uncertainty, called on path strategic certainty. On path strategic certainty is the assump...