Deliberation in International Negotiations

This paper advances a theoretical framework to study the deliberative quality of international negotiations. The framework starts with a consideration of ‘deliberative negotiations’ drawing upon related work in deliberative democracy. It asks fundamentally how the deliberative quality of multilateral negotiations can be evaluated, drawing upon the deliberative quality index (DQI). The framework then makes advancements to extant literature by probing how the effects of time horizons (short vs. long), veto points (none vs one/several), and publicity (secrecy vs transparency) conceptually intersect with foundational DQI criteria. Shifts in geopolitics, the movement to digital negotiations, and the regime nature of interlocutors are treated as intervening variables conditioning the expected relationships. Tentative support for the framework is illustrated using text data from deliberations in UNCITRAL, UNGA and UNSC negotiations. This conceptual work offers fruitful directions for both empirical analysis of the determinants of international negotiations – specifically on the scope conditions for deliberative quality in said negotiations – as well as lays the groundwork for richer normative assessments of how deliberative legitimacy should be evaluated and prescribed.