Depth versus Rigidity in the Design of International Agreements∗

I show that there is a trade-off in the design of international agreements between depth and rigidity. Increasing the depth of required cooperation both lowers the likelihood of compliance with the treaty and decreases the stability of the regime. In contrast, as the rigidity of an agreement increases (and there is less opportunity for tolerated defection from treaty obligations), the likelihood of compliance with the treaty increases while the stability of the regime decreases. Treaty designers must balance short-term compliance against the long-run stability of a cooperative regime. I argue that this implies a negative relationship between depth and rigidity in observed treaties. In international trade, agreements that mandate deep tariff reductions will be more likely to include flexibility mechanisms—such as formal dispute settlement mechanisms, escape clauses, and antidumping procedures—while agreements that require shallow cooperation will be more rigid. I find strong support for this argument by conducting empirical tests on a dataset of 57 Asian trade agreements. ∗Many thanks to B. Peter Rosendorff, who collaborated on an earlier version of this project. I’d like to thank Raymond Hicks and Soo Yeon Kim for generously making their data available to me. I also thank Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, Stuart Jordan, Jide Nzelibe, and Matthew Stephenson. Previous versions of this paper were presented at the 2009 Political Economy and Public Law workshop at the University of Chicago and the 2010 Politics of Preferential Trade Agreements workshop at Princeton Unversity. †Department of Political Science, UCLA. 4289 Bunche Hall. Los Angeles, CA 90095.