The Power of Boilerplate: Bilateralism, Plurilateralism, and the International Tax System

How do states exercise power in complex, decentralized governance regimes? This article sheds light on this question by analyzing one of the pillars of the post-war economic order: the international tax regime. The taxation of multinational enterprises is governed by a system composed of thousands of Bilateral Tax Treaties signed between pairs of national governments. We argue that despite the bilateral nature of these treaties, their legal content is largely controlled by a small group of economically powerful governments. By drafting and promoting “boilerplate” legal language, and by leveraging network effects, OECD countries were able to build a coherent, encompassing, quasi-multilateral regime to govern the taxation of multinationals in most of the world. We test and find support for our arguments about the role of network effects and the power of boilerplate using inferential network analysis and an automated text analysis of a corpus of 3200 treaty texts.