What determines states’ ability to influence the contents of international institutions? Extant scholarship on international economic negotiations highlights the importance of political and economic capacity in negotiations. In this article, we argue that another structural source of negotiating power has been overlooked: bureaucratic capacity. Building on in-depth interviews with a large sample of international economic negotiators, we develop a theory of how differences in bureaucratic capacity can give states advantages in bilateral negotiations. We test our theory on a dataset of bilateral investment treaties. To measure preference attainment, we combine a unique repository of states’ public negotiating mandates called model treaties and the texts of finalized investment treaties to compute the verbatim distances between states’ stated preferences and the treaties they negotiate. We then show that states with greater bureaucratic capacity than their counterparts tend to achieve higher preference attainment in investment treaty negotiations. Our results have important implications for scholarship on international negotiations and for policy-makers engaged in investment policy reform.

什么决定了国家影响国际机构内容的能力？现有的关于国际经济谈判的学术研究强调了政治和经济能力在谈判中的重要性。在本文中，我们认为谈判权力的另一个结构性来源被忽视了：官僚能力。在对大量国际经济谈判代表进行深入访谈的基础上，我们提出了一个理论，即官僚能力的差异如何使国家在双边谈判中获得优势。我们在双边投资条约的数据集上测试我们的理论。为了衡量偏好程度，我们将国家公共谈判授权的独特存储库（称为示范条约）和最终投资条约的文本结合起来，计算国家声明的偏好与其谈判的条约之间的逐字距离。然后，我们表明，与同行相比，官僚能力更强的国家往往在投资条约谈判中获得更高的优先权。我们的研究结果对国际谈判学术研究和参与投资政策改革的政策制定者具有重要意义。