Oona Hathaway provides one of the most influential and strongest statements against the idea that treaties retain a particular political purpose and that they could actually be inferior to the executive agreement of Congress. With respect to the identity of the parties, the agreements were concluded in the data set between the United States and one or more of 215 countries or governmental organizations and fifty-two international organizations. Table 3 shows the 20 countries with the highest number of agreements in the data set. A full list of agreements by partner countries is included in the online schedule. The three most common contractors are all Western European countries, namely France, Italy and Germany. In multilateral agreements, 20% is concluded in the form of a treaty, which far exceeds the share of all bilateral relations. The fact that the guide contains a list of contracts indexed in TIF in the year prior to the year prior to publication, but which are no longer indexed thereafter, is a priority of this analysis. The guide helps to identify the agreements that have been removed from the TIF and the year of the deletion. The U.S.

State Department considers that an agreement that is on the previous year`s tIF list but is not listed this year is no longer in effect by the State Department. The footnote 70 deletions is based on one of four reasons, although the TIF does not indicate the reason for a particular deletion. These grounds apply (1) on the basis of the terms of the contract; (2) termination; (3) replacement with another agreement; or (4) termination. First footnote 71, and most importantly, the only known bias in the TIF is the omission of secret agreements that, if published, could threaten national security. Footnote 79 However, since these secret agreements are by definition not known to the public, they are likely to also be absent from other databases. Second, the TIF agreements all follow an understandable selection process: these are agreements that are submitted to Congress in accordance with the case law and are considered by the Department of Foreign Affairs to be in force. Combining these agreements with other databases can lead to unknown selection distortions that compromise the interpretation of the results.