International Treaty Ratification and Leader Turnover

Political leaders are ultimately responsible for their country?s foreign policy, but our understanding of how executive turnover affects the likelihood of international treaty ratification remains limited. For contributing to this debate, I define leader change as the replacement of the executive leader by a new one who relies on different social groups for support. Focusing then on those cases where new leaders can assume office only from predecessors who plausibly supported treaty ratification, I expect that ? in light of the predecessor?s support for an agreement and the change in the domestic support base ? leadership turnover makes ratification less likely. The empirical implication is tested with quantitative methods using data on multilateral treaties of the post-Cold War era. The main findings and a series of additional analyses provide strong and robust evidence for the theoretical argument. This research sheds new light on the determinants of multilateral cooperation as well as the role of government leaders in international affairs and foreign-policy decision-making.