Bilateral Treaties and Foreign Policy Convergence: Evidence from Bilateral Investment Treaties (forthcoming)
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2025
ISSN
1465-7260
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Language
en-US
Abstract
One potential reason for a country to sign a bilateral treaty is that it could result in their new treaty partners having more similar foreign policy preferences. But although commentators have argued that countries often sign treaties for this reason, there is not any empirical research directly testing whether this kind of convergence in foreign policy preferences occurs. We investigate this question by testing whether countries that sign Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) subsequently vote more similarly at the United Nations (UN). Using a stacked event study research design and a sample of BITs signed between 1946 and 2015, we find that signing a BIT is associated with a 4 percent convergence in UN Ideal Points in the following five years. These results are consistent for BITs regardless of their likely economic impact. We further show that the convergence is driven by developing countries aligning their UN voting more closely with their more developed treaty partners and that the largest effects occurred during the decade following the end of the Cold War.
Recommended Citation
Adam Chilton & Weijia Rao,
Bilateral Treaties and Foreign Policy Convergence: Evidence from Bilateral Investment Treaties (forthcoming)
,
American Law and Economics Review
(2025).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/4026
Pre-publication draft
Please note the file available on SSRN may not be the final published version of this work.
