How can we measure and explain the precision of international organizations’ (IOs) founding treaties? We define precision by its negative – imprecision – as indeterminate language that intentionally leaves a wide margin of interpretation for actors after agreements enter into force. Compiling a “dictionary of imprecision” from almost 500 scholarly contributions and leveraging insight from linguists that a single vague word renders the whole sentence vague, we introduce a dictionary-based measure of imprecision (DIMI) that is replicable, applicable to all written documents, and yields a continuous measure bound between zero and one. To demonstrate that DIMI usefully complements existing approaches and advances the study of (im-)precision, we apply it to a sample of 76 IOs. Our descriptive results show high face validity and closely track previous characterizations of these IOs. Finally, we explore patterns in the data, expecting that imprecision in IO treaties increases with the number of states, power asymmetries, and the delegation of authority, while it decreases with the pooling of authority. In a sample of major IOs, we find robust empirical support for the power asymmetries and delegation propositions. Overall, DIMI provides exciting new avenues to study precision in International Relations and beyond.

我们如何衡量和解释国际组织 (IO) 创始条约的准确性？我们将精确性定义为否定的——不精确性——作为在协议生效后故意为行为者留下广泛解释余地的不确定语言。我们从近 500 篇学术贡献中编译了一个“不精确词典”，并利用语言学家的洞察力，即一个模糊的词会使整个句子变得模糊，我们引入了一种基于字典的不精确度量 (DIMI)，它是可复制的，适用于所有书面文件，并产生一个介于 0 和 1 之间的连续测量范围。为了证明 DIMI 有效地补充了现有方法并推进了（不）精度的研究，我们将其应用于 76 个 IO 的样本。我们的描述性结果显示出较高的面部效度，并密切跟踪这些 IO 的先前特征。最后，我们探索了数据中的模式，预计 IO 条约的不精确性会随着国家数量、权力不对称和授权的增加而增加，而随着权力的汇集而减少。在主要 IO 的样本中，我们发现对权力不对称和授权命题的有力实证支持。总体而言，DIMI 为研究国际关系及其他领域的精确性提供了令人兴奋的新途径。我们为权力不对称和授权命题找到了强有力的经验支持。总体而言，DIMI 为研究国际关系及其他领域的精确性提供了令人兴奋的新途径。我们为权力不对称和授权命题找到了强有力的经验支持。总体而言，DIMI 为研究国际关系及其他领域的精确性提供了令人兴奋的新途径。