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Debates over whether transnational and international legal institutions are fair, effective, or legitimate responses to corruption of local public officials have an important empirical dimension. We use case studies to examine whether foreign legal institutions serve as fair, effective, and legitimate complements to local anticorruption institutions. We refer to this set of claims as the “institutional complementarity theory.” The first case study centers on proceedings concerning bribes paid by subsidiaries of Siemens AG, a German company, to obtain and retain a contract to provide national identity cards for the Argentine government. The second case study examines events stemming from overbilling in the construction of a courthouse in Brazil. Analysis of these cases suggests that the institutional complementary theory is credible. At the same time, the findings suggest that local institutions have greater potential, and foreign institutions have more limited potential, than the theory assumes.

One of the most pressing challenges in anti-corruption law is whether and how to coordinate enforcement across multiple agencies, that is to say, under conditions of institutional multiplicity. One approach is modular enforcement, which involves dividing responsibility for enforcement among multiple institutions that are able, but not required, to coordinate their activities. The relatively impressive performance of Brazil’s anti-corruption agencies around the beginning of the twentieth century has been attributed to this kind of institutional modularity. We examine whether other similarly situated countries adopted the Brazilian approach. Specifically, we compare the extent to which the modular approach to anti-corruption enforcement was reflected in the national anti-corruption institutions of Brazil and five other South American countries as of 2014. We find little evidence that Brazil’s neighbors adopted the modular approach and suggest a variety of political, intellectual and institutional factors that may limit the attraction of institutional modularity outside the Brazilian context. Our analysis also demonstrates the value of an approach to comparative legal analysis which extends beyond the judiciary and the police to cover the full range of institutions involved in law enforcement.

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