Do formal voting rules and other aspects of agreement design reflect or ignore the realities of power? In this chapter, I examine whether the conjecture Asymmetry of Power is reflected in Asymmetry of Control is supported by the COIL data. If power is at least somewhat reflected in the provisions of international law, Krisch's depiction of the relationship between law and power seems questionable. At the same time, if the provisions of international law correspond always and exactly to the configuration of power, one cannot plausibly argue that law has any kind of constraining effect on powerful states. Of course, at least one other possibility remains: As mentioned in Chapter 8, Stone (2011) and Cogan (2009) argue that the Power Asymmetries inherent in many cooperative endeavors most likely manifest informally, while formal law represents a consensus among all state parties. Thus looking at the degree to which the hypothesis about Asymmetry of Power is or is not supported by the data might also give us a sense of whether and how often formal and informal provisions might conflict.

In what follows, I begin by presenting the (moderate) view of this book: Agreement design neither completely reflects nor completely ignores the realities of power. I then present some descriptive statistics about how often the provisions of the agreements in the COIL sample reflect the underlying distribution of power. I probe the conjecture regarding power and institutional design with the data to see how well it is supported. I then present three case studies (using agreements from the sample) that illustrate some of the themes of this chapter and generate some interesting questions for future research.