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A homogenized political economic globe cannot occur due to the variance in world-views between those who are powerful internationally and those who are powerful locally. Powerful international actors have the ability to diffuse institutions across the globe, but they do not have the power to see those institutions implanted into domestic arenas without modification. This is particularly true in democratic settings, where the identities and interests of substate or local groups and leaders can have direct bearing on the livelihood of state leaders and the health of the democracy itself. In such cases, state leaders must include concessions to substate actors in order to legitimize newly diffused institutions. As we see in the Bolivia case, diffusing foreign institutions into such democratic settings carries a risk, namely that granting concessions in order to appease substate actors could in turn empower these actors and provide them with a window of opportunity for remaking the domestic polity. Diffusion may make for entirely unintended consequences. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The promulgation of norms and practices is a key concern of many actors, such as those who espouse ideologies of capitalism or democracy. This paper seeks to shed light on the processes by which these norms and practices diffuse from one country to the next. In particular, the paper focuses on those key actors, often referred to as entrepreneurs, who are most central to the diffusion process. The available literature too ambiguously describes the mechanisms by which entrepreneurs integrate foreign norms into the local context, and too often centers the mechanisms at the state level. These mechanisms are generally presented as "localization" or "translation", or the innovative act of framing and grafting foreign norms to the local context. This paper sharpens these notions and separates them into two distinct ideas: translation as the reconstruction of foreign norms and practices at the state and policy level, and localization as the adaptation of imported norms to the local discourse at the substate level. This paper approaches the issue from the context of Bolivian democracy. In particular, it focuses on how two actors, (then-president) Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada and (current president) Evo Morales, launched initiatives to integrate notions of liberal democracy into Bolivia, and acted respectively as a translator and a localizer for Western notions of liberalism and organization. Analyzing this case solidifies the notion that the international diffusion of norms must be studied as a multi-level, multi-faceted process, with interactions and innovations occurring between the international, state, and local levels. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]