The U.S. is an international anomaly in that it has several instruments at its disposal to conclude agreements with other countries. The choice of the instrument determines what steps need to be taken in order to turn an informal promise into a formal and binding agreement under U.S. law. Whereas treaty ratification needs the support of two-thirds of the Senate, the congressional-executive agreement (“CEA”) requires a simple majority in both the Senate and the House.

Under the Obama administration, the treaty has fallen in desuetude, sparking a discussion among scholars and policy makers about whether it is worth preserving the treaty as a policy tool or whether it is time to abandon it altogether in favor of the CEA. This debate turns on whether promises made as treaties are qualitatively different from those concluded as CEAs.

In Giving the Treaty a Purpose: Comparing the Durability of Treaties and Executive Agreements, I empirically analyze this question by examining whether the choice of the instrument has substantive implications for the stability of the agreement. To find an answer, I borrow methods from the medical sciences to analyze the fate of 7,966 international agreements concluded between 1982 and 2012.

The headline finding is illustrated by the figure below, which contrasts the average durability (or “survival probability”) of a treaty to that of a comparable CEA:

As the figure suggests, the treaty is the analogue to the “pinky promise:” It is associated with more stable, longer lasting agreements than those concluded as CEAs, indicating that there are qualitative differences between the two instruments. This implies that abandoning the treaty may have important and unintended negative consequences for the U.S., taking away from policy makers an essential tool used to calibrate the strength and “seriousness” of their promise to other nations.

Find out more about Julian Nyarko’s article, Giving the Treaty a Purpose: Comparing the Durability of Treaties and Executive Agreements, in this video interview:

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