WHEN POLITICS NO LONGER STOPS AT THE WATER’S EDGE: EXPLORING THE EFFECTS OF ASYMMETRIC PARTISAN POLARIZATION ON THE UNITED STATES SENATE’S TREATY APPROVAL PROCESS

The American treaty ratification process is deeply flawed. The Constitutional rules for treaty ratification, specifically that treaties are reviewed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee prior to voting on the Senate floor and that positive advice and consent requires a 2/3 majority in the Senate, leaves the process rife with opportunities for veto players to prevent treaties from moving through the process. Because treaties are the primary means of codifying international cooperation, the inability to pass treaties has dire consequences for the United States. Recently, the U.S. has increasingly failed to consent to treaty ratification, either through formal rejection or rejection through inaction, which has forced Presidents to rely on executive agreements to engage in international agreements, which are seen as weaker and less legitimate. Using a mixed-methods approach, I assess the politics surrounding treaty ratification in the United States. I restructure and revise an existing treaty ratification dataset that includes over 1,000 treaties submitted to the U.S. Senate from 1949 to 2023 to test the thesis that asymmetric partisan polarization is the driving factor behind treaty delay and inaction in the United States. I then conduct an in-depth case study of the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), one of the longest-standing pending treaties in the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to further test the asymmetric partisan polarization thesis and to define tactics the more extreme party uses to exert control over the treatymaking process. Through the empirical analysis and case study, I find strong evidence that political dynamics of asymmetric partisan polarization and the tactics of the Republican party are the main factor driving treaty dysfunction in the United States.