| This study explains why, among a group of relatively similar states, certain states but not others would comply with the same international legal commitment. Building on insights from Constructivist theories about the domestic impacts of international norms, the literature on "ideas" in Comparative Politics, and a theory of legal reasoning, the study introduces a novel theoretical framework to explain variations in compliance by the United States, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom with the 1997 OECD Convention on Combating the Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions. 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 norm of anti-corruption 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 nonmaterialist variables, having to do with features of the actor that is doing the norm articulation in the domestic political context---the norm entrepreneur Transparency International---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. |
