The Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade, an agreement under the umbrella of the World Trade Organization, prescribes rules pertaining to technical regulations, standards and conformity assessment procedures. One of the important hallmarks of the agreement is the use of international...

Most party systems have seen a considerable rise in polarization during the past decades. We show that fiscal policies have contributed to this development. Our macro-level analysis of 166 elections since 1980 finds that austerity increases both electoral abstention and votes for non-mainstream...

We are experiencing a tumultuous period in global politics, with international economic governance facing a period of great uncertainty. Meanwhile, since the de facto collapse of the WTO's Doha Round, a plethora of preferential agreements has begun to supplant the WTO's rule-making function and...

The Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS Agreement) is a complex agreement under the umbrella of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and concerns the interplay between governmental measures concerning risk for human, animal and plant life or health, the necessary scientific...

Published on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the World Trade Organization, the so-called Sutherland Report was to address institutional challenges in the new millennium. This commentary analyzes the report's underlying notion of the organization's self-understanding and critically...

International standards are central to domestic rule-making processes. While these standards-developed outside the WTO-are in and of themselves not binding, the SPS Agreement gives them a quasi-binding character as WTO members must provide scientific justification should they wish to deviate...