| This dissertation is an empirical study of the negotiations of international multilateral agreements. This dissertation recognizes that international agreements are endogenous - they are the product of interactions and bargaining among states - and therefore the focus is on what occurs during the negotiation process. The negotiations of multilateral agreements are often long and laborious endeavors, but international relations scholars know very little about what occurs during the bargaining of such agreements, and systematic empirical work is seriously lacking. In this dissertation, I derive a number of hypotheses from the international cooperation and bargaining literature and then test them using a new dataset that I collected of facts related to the multilateral agreement making process. The dataset includes data on what occurred during the negotiations of 170 multilateral agreements, across several different issue areas. Some existing theoretical claims in the literature are subjected to rigorous empirical analysis for the first time.; After a brief introduction, I provide a description of my research design in chapter 2. In this chapter I also provide a description on the coding of the major variables of interest and am able to answer how long the negotiation of these agreements lasted on average, whether a state or non-state actor submitted the first proposal, and how many states participated in negotiations on average. In the third through fifth chapters, I derive hypotheses based on propositions from the literature, which are then tested. In chapter 3 I find that the number of negotiating parties and the shadow of the future can have significant effects on the duration of negotiations. Chapters 4 and 5 analyze the effect that who makes the first proposal in the bargaining process may have on the size of membership to an agreement and the depth of cooperation and examine whether a "broader-deeper" tradeoff exists. In chapter 6 I identify a number of different ways in which multilateral agreements are negotiated, and a number of case studies are used to illustrate some of the common patterns in the multilateral agreement making process. |
