The politics of trade agreement design : revisiting the depth - flexibility nexus

Existing research indicates that different dimensions of the design of international institutions are interrelated. In particular, deep agreements have been shown to be more flexible. We make two contributions to this literature. On the one hand, we argue and empirically show that the positive relationship between depth and flexibility holds for preferential trade agreements (PTAs). On the other hand, we add two qualifications to the conventional wisdom about depth and flexibility going hand in hand. First, we argue that the positive relationship between depth and flexibility is weaker for democracies than for non-democracies. Second, when making deep agreements more flexible, countries also add strings to the use of the additional flexibility provisions. An original dataset on the design of 587 PTAs allows us to test our arguments. Both descriptive evidence and multivariate statistics support the theoretical expectations. The findings contribute to the literatures on the design of international institutions and the causes and consequences of PTAs.