Comparative Politics of International Environmental Agreements and the EU

This paper considers the long-standing debate in the field of leaders and laggards of environmental policy in Europe. Although there exists a large body of literature on the subject, previous studies reveal mixed results due to methodological limitations and operationalisation issues, leading to a lack of empirical evidence. In this paper, we propose an empirical strategy to rank the environmental policy performance of EU Member States based on the 'commitment' to international environmental treaties and the 'difficulty' of their treaty collection. We use a multilevel partial credit model from the Rasch family of item response models. We compare the descriptive and explanatory models to examine the impact of country -specific characteristics on country ranking. The results suggest that well-known environmental leaders maintain consistent performance over time. However, some of the socalled laggards have fared better after considering country -specific factors, suggesting that the methodology used to assess performance is crucial in evaluating the progress achieved by the Member States. Our results provide a transparent ranking of the Member States which is necessary to develop sound policies and legal rules for environmental protection.