NGOs as catalysts for international arms control? The ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in the United States

The article investigates the role of pro-arms control non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in furthering the domestic ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in the United States. The study starts out from the two-level framework for analysing domestic ratification processes of international agreements, and it introduces the concept of audience gains to complement this framework: being the counterpart of audience costs, audience gains denote positive contributions of domestic non-state actors to formal ratification processes. The article distinguishes two complementary pathways for NGOs to generate audience gains, that is, the pathways of ‘mobilising consensus’ and of ‘persuading veto players’. Two in-depth case studies on the ratification of the CWC and the CTBT in the US explore the extent to which pro-agreement NGOs were indeed successful in employing the two pathways. The evidence of the case studies is that NGOs were more influential catalysts of the ratification of the CWC than with respect to the CTBT. The article's findings on the prospects for NGOs to push the domestic ratification of international agreements are expected to be of more general relevance beyond the field of arms control.