Designing suspension clauses to defend democracy: lessons from negotiating the OAS's Washington Protocol

Abstract

Nine regional international organisations (RIOs) have adopted suspension clauses to defend democracy since 1990, but we have a weak historical understanding of the conditions under which these clauses are designed. The literature has advanced numerous arguments about delegation, generally based on power, preferences and norms. This article asks under what conditions RIO member states support suspension clauses for democracy enforcement, and what shapes their preferences over the design of said clauses. Taking the lock-in hypothesis as a starting point, I offer an alternative explanation to that of regime type: the nature of a state’s anti-democratic experiences determines its preferences for expansive or restrictive multilateral democracy enforcement. States that suffered from external threats to their political regime will prefer a narrow scope and restricted use of suspension clauses, while those that suffered primarily from internal threats will be in favour of a broader role for RIOs and a more readily applicable suspension clause. I test the plausibility of this explanation in a case study which reconstructs the negotiations for the first such suspension clause in this era, the 1992 Washington Protocol amending the Charter of the Organisation of American States (OAS).