International Multilateral Agreement Negotiations

Prepared for presentation at the 2006 Shambaugh Conference, “Building Synergies: Institutions and Cooperation in World Politics,” October 12-14, 2006, University of Iowa. Abstract 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. Little empirical work on how multilateral agreements are negotiated exists because data on the negotiations of a large number of agreements across multiple issue areas has not been collected. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new database 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. Research design and case selection are discussed, as well as the coding of three variables unique to the dataset: the length of negotiations, the first proposal maker, and the number of negotiating states. Descriptive statistics on these variables are also provided