‘Strategic under-enforcement’ to ‘strategic enforcement’: what do trends in patterns of anticorruption enforcement reveal about collective action on cross-border corruption?

Cross-border corruption is a collective action problem requiring a coordinated multilateral response. Since the 1970s, the normative basis for what constitutes corruption and how it should be addressed has continued to evolve, with normative alignment among western democracies resulting in coordinated multilateral action on issues such as international bribery. Western democracies now have a range of instruments at their disposal to address cross-border corruption, from anti-bribery legislation targeting the supply side of cross-border cases to selective policy instruments such as sanctions to target corrupt individuals and their ill-gotten gains. The development of this current global anticorruption regime reflects how states must contend with multiple, at times conflicting or incompatible, demands in establishing and using anticorruption instruments. Initially, concerns over economic disadvantages resulted in the ‘strategic under-enforcement’ of anti-bribery legislation by the United States until other developed economies were bound by similar rules. In contrast, over the last decade, states’ foreign policy agendas have increasingly become entangled with the selective use of instruments such as sanctions, resulting in strategic enforcement. This paper compares U.S. and E.U. cross-national enforcement patterns for two instruments within the global anticorruption regime that have different purposes: anti-bribery legislation and corruption-related sanctions. Examining whether enforcement trends for both instruments reflect competitive (economic or political) interests or not, the paper explores whether unilateral or multilateral enforcement is more closely correlated with norm-based or interest-based enforcement motivations. Furthermore, the paper identifies that even interest-based unilateral action on corruption can jumpstart a ‘norm-cascade’.