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The Dynamics of Multilateral Treaty-Making

Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, USA, denemark{at}udel.edu

Matthew J. Hoffmann

Department of Political Science, University of Toronto, 100 St. George St, Toronto, Ontario M5S2K3, Canada, mjhoff{at}utsc.utoronto.ca

Despite its importance in the global system, the literature provides little guidance on how treaty-making emerged as a well-accepted practice. In either assuming the appropriateness of treaty-making (and then analysing design) or treating treaties as strategic choices in the pursuit of gains (without analysing how treaties came to be a way to pursue gains), the current literature discounts the emergence and evolution of treaty-making. This lacuna contributes to a biased view of treaty-making as the epiphenomenal result of specific, ahistorical factors, rather than as a patterned, historical practice. We contend that the evolution of the practice of treaty-making is significant for questions of design/compliance, the future of multilateral interaction and global order. In addressing this concern, we pursue two linked goals. The first is self-consciously descriptive. We introduce a dataset of multilateral treaties that provides a novel picture of treaty-making across time, space and issue-areas. The second goal is explanatory. We develop and test a social constructivist and path-dependent explanation for the patterns of treaty-making evident in the data, especially 150 years of exponential growth, the spread of treaty-making across multiple issues and the diffusion of the practice across the world.

Key Words: increasing returns • multilateral treaties and treaty-making • path dependence • social constructivism

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