Beyond coercion: Weaker states' domestic political motivations for political clauses in preferential trade agreements

Abstract Political scientists have debated under what circumstances countries choose to integrate sovereignty‐limiting provisions into their international agreements. In contrast to the conventional wisdom that powerful countries bully weak countries into political acquiescence, weak countries can deliberately adopt such provisions as a deterrence against potential non‐democratic takeovers. Using a novel dataset on political provisions in all preferential trade agreements (PTAs) signed between 1945 and 2018, we find that the greater, the weaker countries' risk of non‐democratic takeovers, the more likely they are to adopt democracy‐promoting and rule‐of‐law provisions in their PTAs. This finding suggests that a government's desire to tie the opposition's hands can also lead it to tie its own hands. Our findings have implications for not only the scholarly and political debates on commitments in international treaties but also the growing literature on non‐trade issues in PTAs.