Twelve governments recently signed the much-anticipated Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), sparking heated debate about its merits. As a primary motivation for this first “mega-regional” agreement, US President Barack Obama argues that the TPP is a way for the USA, and not China or someone else, to write the global trade rules of the future. This begs some important questions, namely which country or countries really did write most of the TPP and thus whose agenda for 21st century trade might it advance? To answer these questions, we compare the recently-released text of the TPP to the language in the 74 previous trade agreements that TPP members signed since 1995. Our text-as-data analyses reveal that the contents of the TPP are taken disproportionately from earlier US trade agreements. The ten preferential trade agreements (PTAs) that most closely match the TPP are all US PTAs. Moreover, the contents of controversial chapters, such as the one on investment, are drawn even more heavily from past US treaty language. Our study and findings apply power-based accounts of international institutions to a landmark new agreement, and portray a more active, template-based process of international diffusion.

The newest rules for global trade After years of opaque negotiations, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, was signed on 5 October 2015 by twelve Pacific-Rim countries. The TPP represents a notable development in global trade and has attracted much attention, but it is far from the first preferential trade agreement (PTA) for any of the dozen signatories. Indeed, each country has signed multiple other PTAs over the past decade. Thus we set out to compare the TPP to the many agreements signed before it in order to reveal where the contents in the TPP come from and which member(s) played the greatest role in crafting the agreement. As the most high-profile trade agreement in years, the TPP could establish important guidelines for global trade moving forward. This agenda-setting rationale is emphasized by leaders across the membership, including President Obama, who professes the following logic: “…the TPP means that America will write the rules of the road in the 21st century…if America doesn’t write those rules—then countries like China will” (Obama, 2015). This raises an important but thus far unanswered question: whose vision for modern trade agreements does the TPP best reflect? Dictating new rules is an important way for states to exercise influence on the global stage, and the answers to this question can inform general debates about whether international institutions are driven by powerful states and how ideas spread globally. We evaluate the TPP in a new way by systematically comparing the recently-released text of the TPP to the language in previous trade agreements that its members have signed. Our text-as-data analyses reveal that the language in the TPP comes disproportionately from US trade agreements. The ten PTAs that most closely resemble the TPP are all US agreements, and the contents of the most controversial chapters in the TPP draw heavily from US PTAs. These findings provide an important new example of how powerful states use international institutions strategically to advance their interests (Drezner, 2007). They also suggest a more active global diffusion story (Solingen, 2012) – one in which countries have competing blueprints for what should be included in international agreements and work actively to insert their preferred rules into landmark treaties.

The evolution of the TPP The TPP resulted from a decade-long process in which participation gradually expanded. The first major development was the signing in 2005 of the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement by New Zealand, Singapore, Chile, and Brunei. In 2008 the USA entered into negotiations with these four, all of whom were joined later that year by Australia, Peru and Vietnam. Over the next five years the advancing TPP negotiations were joined by Malaysia (2010), Canada and Mexico (2012), and ultimately Japan (2013). The TPP is intended as a “living agreement,” meaning that any future TPP members – including China – would be asked to sign the agreement as is, thus accepting what the original signatories have specified. This makes the language in the TPP critically important for the future. For years our knowledge of the TPP was based on conjecture, unofficial comments from participants, and the release via Wikileaks of controversial draft chapters. But since the negotiated text was released on 5 November 2015, the entire agreement has been publicly available to researchers and observers. Particularly notable are competing studies of the agreement’s macroeconomic effects, with the pro-trade Peterson Institute for International Economics concluding that the TPP would boost wages and exports (Petri and Plummer, 2016) and a study by Tufts University’s Global Development and Environment Institute predicting lower wages and significant job losses (Capaldo et al., 2016). Other studies emphasize the mostly-positive effects in selected sectors (Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2016) or negative effects in others (Powell et al., 2016). The investment chapter, particularly the section on investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), has attracted considerable attention, nearly all of it negative and from organizations that long have been critical on these issues (e.g. Bernasconi-Osterwalder, 2015; Johnson and Sachs, 2015). We take a different approach toward answering our question about the TPP, by analyzing the entire agreement using a novel and unbiased methodology. The TPP needs to be placed in the context of the many bilateral and plurilateral trade agreements negotiated since the World Trade Organization (WTO) was established in 1994. Given the continued gridlock in WTO trade negotiations, preferential agreements like the TPP have become a way for states to advance trade cooperation with willing partners beyond their WTO commitments (Mansfield and Reinhardt, 2003). As the first “mega-regional” agreement, the TPP could become the new standard for all future trade agreements – and perhaps the basis for any future multilateral negotiations at the WTO. Therefore, the country or countries that had the greatest hand in writing the TPP could see their influence magnified if the contents of the TPP become the standard legal text and spread into future agreements. This dynamic suggests that countries like the USA can dictate future trade cooperation if they dominate emergent institutions like the TPP (e.g. Barnett and Duvall, 2005; Drezner, 2009).

Data and methodology Because we are interested in the extent to which actors obtained their preferred content in the TPP, we first compile and prepare the texts of the relevant trade agreements, starting with the recently-released text of the TPP.5 Next we utilize the Design of Trade Agreements project and website (Dür et al., 2014) and WTO Trade Agreements Gateway to identify all PTAs signed by TPP members since 1995, a period that provides a sufficient time-window for comparison but also ensures that comparisons are among modern, new-generation agreements. There are 74 such PTAs, all of which have official versions in English. To facilitate consistent comparison, we eliminate idiosyncratic information at the beginning and end of agreements (signed dates and locations, pronouncements, etc.), convert all text to lowercase, and remove punctuation. Several features of our study lead us to eschew the bag-of-words approach to analyzing speech and text, which disregards text order and is often deployed inductively.6 First, the structure of our analysis is dictated by theory and known to us ex ante, since we want to compare the TPP with a specific collection of possible source PTAs. Second, the order of text is important, since we are analyzing carefully-crafted agreement language that is laid out in a deliberate structure. Likewise, the precise wording of the text also matters because even small differences in text can have a profound effect on legal interpretation (Spirling, 2012). Therefore, we adopt a methodology that computes textual similarity for any two documents – in our case the TPP and each of the 74 existing PTAs – by identifying perfectly-matching text in common word sequences greater than six words.7 Relying on common 6-grams or greater allows us to preserve important information contained in word order and ensures that simple, everyday phrases do not constitute a match.8 This approach, and these same metrics, have been used in other social-science applications (e.g. Corley et al., 2011; Ehsbaugh-Soha, 2013). For each PTA–TPP pairing we generate the number of perfectly matching words, which we then divide by the total words in the PTA to produce a “percentage copied” number that is comparable across agreements. We also aggregate these agreement percentages at the country level, to see which of the 12 members was most successful in getting its preferred contents in the TPP.

Conclusion Text analysis is increasingly popular in the social sciences, and the methodology is particularly valuable when the text being analyzed is consequential and deliberate. The TPP is both. Our research represents a new approach toward studying the TPP as well as international cooperation generally. It provides much-needed context by showing that the TPP is best thought of as a competition among members to insert their vision for trade cooperation into an important new agreement. The TPP and other PTAs are lengthy and wide-ranging documents, and we provide a new way to quantify them, and their most important parts, in their entirety. Our findings regarding the sizeable US role in writing the TPP have implications for several literatures. To begin, we suggest that international diffusion is not always passive or due to mimicry, but instead can occur because governments actively champion a particular blueprint for international cooperation. Whose model prevails in negotiations is determined largely by bargaining power. Thus notable initiatives like the TPP cannot be separated from power politics and their geopolitical context. Looked at in this way, the TPP is best thought of as an attempt by the USA to shift trade cooperation away from the deadlocked WTO to a new venue where it can successfully write the trade rules for the future. This agenda-setting motivation is central to understanding the TPP, and it will be interesting to observe whether PTAs in the near future draw heavily upon the language in the TPP. Lastly, our findings provide new information to inform long-standing debates about the trade regime and imminent debates about TPP ratification. We have shown that modern PTAs are quite heterogeneous. The TPP represents an interesting amalgam of its members’ priorities – since a certain amount of past language from each can be found in the new agreement. Perhaps this suggests some movement toward convergence of trade rules. Yet it appears that any future convergence will be on US terms. We can say with confidence that the USA took a lead role in writing these newest trade rules, both overall and on the most controversial and unsettled issues. What remains to be seen is whether the TPP is ratified and where global trade cooperation advances next.

Acknowledgements We thank Eric Dunford, Neil Lund, Kris Miler, Clint Peinhardt, two anonymous reviewers, and the editor at Research & Politics for helpful comments and suggestions.

Declaration of Conflicting Interest

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Supplementary Material

The replication files are available at: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/researchandpolitics. The supplementary files are available at: http://rap.sagepub.com/content/3/3.

Notes 1.

See the discussion in the ‘Data and methodology’ section for details on how the texts are compared to one another. 2.

We organize the preferential trade agreements (PTAs) in the heat map by country, beginning with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) member with the largest gross domestic product (GDP) (the USA) down to the member with the smallest GDP (Brunei). In the cases where an existing PTA includes more than one TPP member, we include it for the member with the larger GDP. 3.

The average similarity is less than 18%, and three-quarters of the dyads among these 74 preferential trade agreements contain less than 25% of overlapping text. 4.

Efforts such as the Design of Trade Agreements project (Dür et al., 2014) represent a major advance because they unpack preferential trade agreements (PTAs) and code their contents with dozens of numeric variables. But even well-conceived numeric codings can be unavoidably blunt, capturing things such as whether a PTA has a particular chapter, without being able to distinguish the fine-grained details of what is in those chapters. 5.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) text is taken from the website of the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which has cleaned and verified the entire agreement (http://www.tpp.mfat.govt.nz/text). Since the TPP is presented by chapter, we also create a single document that combines the text from across the various TPP chapters and thus represents the “full text” of the TPP. 6.

The bag-of-words assumption emphasizes the frequency with which terms appear across a set of documents and does not take word order into account. This approach is common in data mining and text analysis applications where the goal is topic modeling, sentiment analysis, or the inductive discovery of author ideal points (see Manning et al., 2008; Spirling, 2012). 7.

To do so, we utilize Wcopyfind 4.1.4, a program written by Bloomfield (2014). The source code can be found at: http://plagiarism.bloomfieldmedia.com/wordpress/software/wcopyfind/ 8.

Most common phrases are shorter than six words and thus are not counted. However, even longer common phrases such as “This article is without prejudice to” would comprise only 0.006% (6/100,000) of a document containing 100,000 words, a typical length for a preferential trade agreement. 9.

Although a detailed explanation of these other-country trends is beyond of the scope of this paper, one possibility for Japan and Mexico is that their low percentages are due to them joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership late. 10.

Results from analysis of variance (F = 16.067, p = 0.000) indicate a statistically significant difference between the average amount of text replicated across the Trans-Pacific Partnership signatories. Furthermore, post-hoc analyses using Tukey’s honest significant difference test confirm that the difference between the mean total of replicated text by the USA is higher than all 11 pairwise mean comparisons (all p-values < 0.02). See the explanatory note associated with our article at: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/researchandpolitics 11.

Brunei and Vietnam are omitted from Table 1 because their original percentages are unchanged across the different comparison criteria. 12.

We allow up to 5 imperfections in the text as long as these imperfections do not account for more than 80% of the text in a matching sequence. For example, if a world is misspelled or pluralized it will be skipped over to match adjacent, perfectly-matching text.

Carnegie Corporation of New York Grant

The open access article processing charge (APC) for this article was waived due to a grant awarded to Research & Politics from Carnegie Corporation of New York under its ‘Bridging the Gap’ initiative. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author.