Transparency and the Formation of International Agreements: Evidence from EU-Treaty Making

Following the negotiations of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (“TTIP”), a lot has been written about transparency during international negotiations and its implications to the legitimacy of international law. Missing from this debate, however, is systematic information on actual transparency practices during international negotiations as well as some of its correlates. Using a novel dataset measuring document disclosures during the negotiations of 459 European Union-Third State international agreements between 1999 and 2018, this chapter attempts to study transparency practices in treaty-making. Firstly, the statistical analysis suggests first that, contrary to previous literature, there is little variance in transparency practices across issue-areas. Secondly, the chapter studies the impact of preference polarization among member-states on transparency outcomes during international negotiations. Contrary to previous findings, the analysis finds no evidence suggesting that polarization among member-states leads to more opacity in international law-making.