著者

藤田 泰昌

出版者

JAPAN ASSOCIATION OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

雑誌

国際政治 (ISSN:04542215)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.2010, no.160, pp.160_108-121, 2012

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What explains the differences in the frequency with which developed democratic countries resort to dispute settlement (DS) under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and World Trade Organization (WTO)? The present paper proposes three hypotheses: 1) Countries with small constituencies frequently use DS in the GATT/WTO, 2) Countries with few veto players measured by the number of government parties use DS frequently, and 3) Countries with a competitive agricultural sector tend to use DS frequently. The purpose of this paper is to show that both of the two domestic political institutional factors, constituency size and number of government parties, are important determinants of GATT/WTO filing.<br>Existing literature have seldom analyzed these two political factors simultaneously. This is because they not only belong to "consensus model" (Lijphardt 1999) but also are highly correlated. As such, they are often considered as two sides of the same coin and it is rendered useless to put them in the same set of analysis simultaneously. However, there are some studies, such as Nielson (2003), that argue that constituency size and number of government parties, may have opposite effects on foreign policies. This latter finding thus urges us to study the impact of these factors more closely in a combinational manner. The present study employs Qualitative Comparative Analysis as a method to examine combinational effects of the two factors.<br>The result of the analysis shows that either of the following two combinational conditions leads an advanced democracy to become a frequent complainant. First, as "consensus model" indicates, countries with both small constituency and small number of government parties are frequent complainants. Second, countries with competitive agricultural sector and either small constituency or small number of government parties frequently resort to DS. The latter combinational conditions indicate that frequent complainant countries need not have both small constituency and small number of government parties, as in "consensus model".