The United States and International Commitments: Treaties as Signaling Devices

Rough first draft; comments welcome. Treaties can serve as a costly signal of states ’ intent to comply with the terms of international agreements. The choice between treaties and informal executive agreements is therefore a strategic governmental decision. This paper presents a signaling model of treaties. The model implies that high-benefit agreements should more likely take the form of treaties, but that there should not be a consistent relationship between the likelihood that a government is reliable and the chance of a treaty. These propositions are tested on a large dataset of U.S. international agreements between 1980 and 1999. The signaling model receives strong support, while models that do not take into account international strategic interaction do not. 1 The agreements that states reach with one another can take many different forms. They can be very informal understandings, more formal agreements that require domestic approval, treaties that require explicit legislative ratification, or they may create new organizations. This paper explores a basic distinction, that between informal agreements and treaties. In the United States, informal agreements are generally known as executive agreements. Few explicit rules govern the choice of agreements ’ form, so the form that any particular agreement takes is the result of strategic considerations