Ratification of the 1992 Climate Change Convention: What Determines Legislative Delay?

The authors use a proportional hazards framework to investigate the impact of various country characteristics on the duration of time taken to ratify the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC). The most significant findings are that the conditional probability of ratification is positively related to total CO2 emissions and the presence of civil liberties. The finding for emissions indicates that large, polluting countries were under great political pressure to ratify the FCCC. The latter finding is consistent with earlier research that found that democratic freedoms raised the probability of signing the Montreal Protocol. Copyright 2000 by Kluwer Academic Publishers