Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper explains why, among a group of relatively similar states, certain states but not others would comply with the same international legal commitment. Drawing on concepts from the ‘ideas’ literature in comparative politics, the literature on global norms in IR, and analyses of reasoning and adjudication in legal philosophy, the paper develops a theoretical framework with which to explain variations in compliance by the US, Germany, France, and the UK with the 1997 OECD anti-bribery Convention. The central argument is that state compliance with an international commitment is a function of the effectiveness with which the global norm at stake in that commitment is articulated in a state’s domestic politics. Effective norm articulation can create the conditions under which a state is unable to produce justifiable reasons for non-compliance, and can provoke compliance despite important countervailing material interests. In the case of the OECD Convention, both powerful strategic trade interests and a powerful international anti-corruption norm are at stake. An analysis of state compliance with the OECD Convention in light of strategic trade theory, however, reveals the limitations of a materialist explanation based on the rationalist framework. Instead, an analysis of norm articulation in the four cases shows the importance of non-materialist variables, having to do with features of the actor that is doing the norm articulation in the domestic political context – the norm entrepreneur – and of the domestic political and normative context into which the global norm is introduced. These features generate four key variables: the legitimacy of the domestic norm entrepreneur; whether the norm entrepreneur enjoys access to the relevant political institutions and policy makers; whether the norm is framed as an element of a high priority policy area, with this framing the result of strategic, instrumental rationality on the part of the norm entrepreneur; and whether the norm resonates in the domestic public policy context, with this resonance a function of public sentiment.