Unilateral Versus Multilateral International Sanctions: A Public Choice Perspective

Multilateral economic sanctions can be expected to impose greaterterms-of-trade effects on a target nation than unilateral sanctions. Yet despite their potential for greater economic damage, multilateral sanctions often are less effective in bringing about desired political results in the target. An interest-group model of endogenous policy suggests that multilateral sanctions can undermine the political effectiveness of opposition groups in the targetcountry, or strengthen those groups supporting the objectionable policy of the ruling regime. Such perverse effects are due in part to the inability of multilateral coalitions to enforce cooperation among members, and to the appropriation of sanctions rents in the target country. Unilateral sanctions, however, imposed by a country with close ties to the target, are ofteneffective in achieving their intended political objectives.     

Fools Suffer Gladly: The Use of Economic Sanctions in International Crises

A number of recent international situations have raised again questions regarding the usefulness of economic sanctions as an instrument of foreign policy. Sanctions continue to be applied in a variety of contexts, yet we have not developed a sufficient understanding of the processes involved to determine when, or even if, sanctions can "work." While a great deal has been written on the subject, there have been neither attempts to subject the theoretical arguments to empirical testing nor efforts to provide systematic theoretical explanations for the empirical results that have been produced. In this article, we attempt to address this shortcoming in the literature. We propose a theory of sanctions effectiveness that is based on the spatial model of bargaining in international crises and use this theory to derive a number of hypotheses regarding when sanctions should produce favorable policy outcomes. We then subject some of the derived hypotheses to an empirical test based on a large number of international disputes. The model suggests that while sanctions will not work in many cases, they can have a slight effect on the distribution of expected outcomes if the costs of the sanctions are sufficiently high relative to the values at stake. The available evidence appears to support these expectations.     

Economic Sanctions and the Politics of IMF Lending

What effect do economic sanctions have on the IMF lending decisions? Though countries under economic sanctions often face significant economic and financial difficulties, no comprehensive research to date has explored whether the IMF as a de facto lender of last resort intervenes in those countries in need. We posit that economic coercion is likely to hinder the target’s access to IMF credits as sanctioning (sender) countries are likely to use their political influence in the IMF to deny funds to the destabilized target economies. To assess the empirical merits of the hypothesis, we combine data on the IMF lending with the economic sanctions data for 120 emerging market economies from 1975 to 2005. Results indicate that target countries are less likely to receive IMF funds, especially when under sanctions by the United States and international institutions. Our findings contradict the conventional wisdom that the IMF is tasked with providing lifelines to member governments in need of help to ease their short-term balance of payment problems. Further, as much as IMF loans can be used as positive inducements to acquire a country’s strategic cooperation, we show that they might also be used by sender countries as a punishment tool against target countries to amplify the impact of sanctions regimes.     

Pioneers of peace research — Lewis Fry Richardson: Apostle of math

Most studies of economic sanctions have concluded that they are ineffective as instruments of foreign policy. In a previous effort, we applied the spatial model of bargaining to the question of sanctions effectiveness to identify the‐conditions under which sanctions can be expected to “work.” In this paper, we refine that analysis by examining the impact of domestic politics in the state that is the target of the sanctions. Sanction episodes may be examples of two‐level games in which the domestic game within both parties affects the international game and vice‐versa. Here, we take a first cut of applying this approach to the analysis of sanctions effectiveness. We extend the spatial model to focus on how sanctions affect the internal political bargaining within the target state. From this, we determine how state policy should change (or not) as a result of the sanctions. We use the basic model to identify general hypotheses regarding the nature of sanctions and their effectiveness and we evaluate some of these hypotheses using cases in which the United States imposed sanctions on Latin American countries for human rights violations.     

Outside the box: Explaining sanctions in pursuit of foreign economic goals*

Despite a marked increase in research on economic sanctions, empirical work has been constrained to a set of cases where sanctions are used for political or security issues, i.e., “high politics.” Since most theories of sanctions are generalizable to cases of political economy, i.e., “low politics,” this ad hoc empirical restriction is puzzling. This paper examines how well the existing theories of economic coercion can explain sanctions used to extract concessions on trade or regulatory issues. These theories are tested on a data set of 86 observations of the United States using or threatening section 301 action against a variety of target states. The results indicate that a conflict expectations approach is able to explain these cases as well as cases of high politics sanctions. Approaches stressing domestic politics or the use of sanctions as signals are of little use.     

Do Sanctions Always Stigmatize? The Effects of Economic Sanctions on Foreign Aid

A prevalent view among both scholars and policymakers is that economic sanctions stigmatize and isolate their targets. According to this perspective, the stigma associated with economic sanctions should signal to foreign aid donors that they should be more cautious and restrained in providing assistance to sanctioned states. We test this signaling-based theory via a large-n analysis of the impact that sanctions imposed by the United States and those supported by the United Nations (UN) had on the aid flows of 133 recipient states from 1960–2000. Contrary to expectations, our results indicate that being subject to sanctions supported by the UN does not have a negative effect on target states’ aid flows, and being sanctioned by the United States actually has a positive effect on them. We explore two potential explanations for our puzzling findings based upon donor self-interest and donor altruism via a scoping analysis of eight sanctions cases in which target states received greater than expected aid flows. Our findings suggest that theories based upon donor self-interest represent the most promising explanation for why individual donors may increase their aid to sanctioned states.     

An effective sanctioning actor? Merging effectiveness and EU actorness criteria to explain evolutions in (in)effective coercion towards Iran

EU sanctions invoked in response to the Iranian nuclear crisis (2006–2016) were long considered to be of limited effectiveness in halting Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Recently, however, sanctions seem to have contributed to a breakthrough in the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme. This article aims at explaining this evolution. It, therefore, designs a framework that explains why sanctions (fail to) change targets’ behaviour. Since the sanctions effectiveness literature lacks an integrated framework to explain evolutions in effective coercion, this article merges sanctions effectiveness variables and Bretherton and Vogler’s actorness criteria. Applying the resulting framework to two broad episodes of the Iranian case (2006–2013 and 2013–2016), this article provides a first test of the framework’s added value. It concludes that a full understanding of sanctions effectiveness requires consideration of external, internal, and in-between factors.     

Strategic Demands, Credible Threats, and Economic Coercion Outcomes

The crisis bargaining literature sees demands as endogenous to crises. However, despite the parallels between military and economic coercion, sanctions researchers have preferred to analyze economic coercion after demands have been issued, and have not explored sufficiently the possibility that when senders formulate their policy objectives, they consider the international constraints imposed by the capabilities and interests of target states. I complement the sanctions literature by deriving the implications of strategic goal formulation in a game theoretic model of economic coercion that assumes endogenous demands. The model explains the inconsistent empirical relationship between sanctions costs and outcomes as well as the paradoxical tendency of senders to select into difficult disputes. I find that threats are not always more effective than sanctions and suggest what an optimal sanctions policy might look like.     

The Limits of Diversion: Rethinking Internal and External Conflict

The diversionary hypothesis offers a powerful alternative to rationalist explanations of war based on the state as a unitary actor. Most recently, it has been used to explain why democratizing states are more likely to initiate the use of force. In the past two decades, however, quantitative tests have produced mixed and often contradictory empirical results regarding the relationship between domestic unrest and external conflict. This article uses a modified “most likely” case study research design to test the hypothesis. Examination of Argentina's seizure of the Falkland Islands and Turkey's invasion of Cyprus, two cases that should be easy for diversion to explain, provide surprisingly little empirical support for the hypothesis, raising doubts about its wider validity as well as the relationship between democratization and war.     

The choice among aid donors: The effects of multilateral vs. bilateral aid on recipient behavioral support

Scholars studying foreign assistance differ over whether multilateral aid is preferable to bilateral aid for promoting development, but nearly all build their cases primarily on highly aggregated cross-national time-series data. We investigate this topic experimentally from the perspective of those whom the foreign aid directly affects: recipient citizens and elites. We thus report results of a survey experiment with behavioral outcomes on more than 3000 Ugandan citizens and over 300 members of Uganda’s Parliament. In spite of a large literature suggesting differences, the findings generally reveal few substantive differences in citizens’ and elites’ preferences and behavior toward the two types of aid. While no strong pattern of differences emerges, limited evidence suggests that the public evinces greater trust in multilateral institutions, and both masses and elites feel that multilateral aid is more transparent. Overall, these null results inform an ever-expanding literature, which is increasingly articulating distinctions between multilateral and bilateral aid. At least in the minds of the recipients, however, multilateral and bilateral aid may not in fact be all that different. This accords with the literature noting the strong overlap in aid organizations and bemoaning the fact that they do not specialize more. Our results raise the question about why have both multilateral and bilateral aid donors if they in effect do the same thing.     

The ambivalent influence of the domestic industries on India’s meandering foreign economic policies

Most of the Indian government’s bi- and multilateral trade initiatives are stuck in political deadlock. At the same time, the unilateral measures are lurching between trade restricting and liberalizing policies. By conducting detailed investigations into the process of the trade policy formulation in three industries, this article seeks to discern the societal pressures that are driving the government’s trade preferences and policies. The empirical results show that the government’s tortuous dealings can be explained by two impulses of the domestic industries that have been emanated by the opening of the economy in the 1990s. Most of the domestic industries—grappling with competition from abroad—will call for some form of protection from the global markets. These compulsions, however, endanger the benefits that other domestic industries derive from the global markets—through the access to intermediate goods, foreign investments or export opportunities. This is why they will militate against protectionist interventions. The outcome is an overall consolidation of the open trade regime, which is, however, frequently upset by spats between different domestic industries over the formulation of trade policies.     

Power Politics or Public Pandering? An Empirical Investigation of Economic Sanctions and Presidential Approval

How do economic sanctions affect presidential approval? Competing claims have been made about the domestic political consequences of economic sanctions. One claim is that sanctions are unpopular because they have negative economic consequences; another claim is that sanctions are popular because they project an image of strength; and another claim is that sanctions are neither popular nor unpopular because the public is uninformed about international affairs. These arguments imply competing identification restrictions. I test these competing models using a Bayesian Structural Vector Autoregression (B-SVAR) model. The results show that sanctions have a moderate negative effect on presidential approval. I use these findings as a basis for a broader set of auxiliary analyses. Despite received wisdom, sanctions imposed for different reasons against different target states do not produce disparate effects on public opinion. These analyses resolve an important empirical dilemma that weighs on a range of theoretical perspectives in the sanctions literature and highlights fruitful avenues for future research.     

Invest,Hold Up,or Accept?China in Multilateral Governance

China has played an inconsistent role in multilateral governance, sometimes contributing to the creation and maintenance of international regimes, sometimes free riding or even threatening to undermine multilateral regimes to improve its position. We show that the strategic context of a particular issue of international concern affects China's approach to multilateralism and argue that our approach adds additional leverage to existing theories that rely on assumptions about its inherent disposition or socialization processes. An emerging global power will be willing to invest more in supporting a regime when its outside options are relatively poor. When its outside options are good, it will free ride on the efforts of more established states if it is not a necessary player in maintaining regimes, and if it is seen as indispensable it will threaten to hold up regime support as a way to win concessions. We show that these two factors, outside options and indispensability, can help explain changes in China's strategy with respect to the issue of North Korea's nuclear program and the regulation of international finance.     

Sleeping With Your Friends' Enemies: An Explanation of Sanctions-Busting Trade

Research indicates that if third parties provide assistance to sanctioned states, the sanctions are less likely to be successful. However, the scholarship on the profile of sanctions busters and their motivations remains underdeveloped. Drawing on the realist and liberal paradigms, this piece develops two competing theories to account for third-party sanctions-busting. The hypotheses drawn from these theories build upon existing work on sanctions, the political determinants of international trade, and the effects of indirect interstate relationships. A quantitative analysis develops a new measure to identify sanctions-busting behavior for a dataset covering 77 sanctions cases from 1950 to 1990. The liberal and realist explanations are then tested. The results offer strong support for the liberal theory of sanctions-busting and less support for the realist theory. In particular, the analysis reveals a counter-intuitive finding that a sender's close allies are more likely to sanctions-bust on the target's behalf than are other states.     

Dead letters on a page? Civic agency and inclusive governance in neopatrimonialism

Neopatrimonialism has explanatory power regarding the limitations of post-war democratization because it considers the combination of formally-democratic institutions together with power relations based on patronage. Neopatrimonialism does not however explain why marginalized groups make political claims in such inhospitable climates, nor have their experiences of governance processes been adequately explored. This paper addresses this gap based on empirical research in Bosnia-Herzegovina, applying a framework of civic agency to elaborate the goals and capacities of civil society actors. Under what conditions can civic agency foster inclusive governance outcomes? The research found that perceptions of limited and ambiguous outcomes from engagement in governance processes encourage civil society organizations to have incrementalist goals and limit self-perceptions of capacity. Inclusive outcomes were nonetheless more likely with persistent intentions and actions. Transactional capacities based on ties to political actors rather than participatory capacities based on political mobilization were more likely to lead to inclusive governance outcomes.     

Determinants of Domestic Terrorism: An Examination of Ethnic Polarization and Economic Development

ABSTRACT

Many scholars have sought to explain why countries with ethnically heterogeneous populations experience higher levels of political violence, but these studies have produced mixed findings. Unlike most studies that use ethno-linguistic fractionalization indices to examine this relationship, we argue that ethnic polarization is a more appropriate measure to assess the role of ethnicity as a causal factor of domestic terrorism. This paper hypothesizes that high ethnic polarization influences the incidence of domestic terrorism, particularly when intervening economic factors are present. To test three hypotheses, we use negative binomial regression to model data from the Global Terrorism Dataset, World Bank, and the Reynal-Querol (RQ) ethnic polarization index of 116 countries between 1970 and 2012. Our findings show that terrorism is more likely to emerge in societies with high ethnic polarization and economic malaise.     

Neo-Kantianism and Coercive Diplomacy: The Complex Case of Economic Sanctions

Although voluminous research connects the neo-Kantian triad—democracy, economic interdependence, and intergovernmental organization membership—to amelioration of conflict processes, comparatively little is known about how these factors relate to economic coercion. We advance the relevant literature on neo-Kantianism and the determinants of sanction decisions by (1) analyzing the impact of all three neo-Kantian factors on economic coercion and (2) assessing the effects of these factors across both the onset of threat and imposition of sanctions. Results from the time-series, cross-national data analyses indicate a significant but complex connection between the neo-Kantian variables and sanctions. Specifically, we find that although democratic regimes are less likely to threaten each other with sanctions, once a threat is made, democracies are more likely to impose sanctions against each other. Economic interdependence and common IGO membership are likely to increase the probability of sanction threats. Yet, the results also suggest that common IGO membership decreases the probability of sanction imposition while economic interdependence has no statistically significant effect on the decision to impose sanctions. Overall, these results highlight the importance of a more nuanced study of sanction decisions for a better understanding of the factors that lead to sanction use.     

Humanitarian impacts of economic sanctions on Iran and Syria

International sanctions against Iran and Syria have been tightened to unprecedented levels since 2012, particularly in the case of the European Union's (EU's) restrictions on the countries' energy and finance sectors. Marking a departure from the EU's carefully targeted sanctions policies of recent decades, they represent de facto comprehensive measures widely associated with negative humanitarian impacts. This paper analyses semi-structured interviews, official discourse and case studies to explore early reports of negative impacts on the health of ordinary citizens in Iran and Syria and examines associated policy responses, particularly in the EU context. The author outlines why a shift towards broader-based sanctions could be problematic for the EU and outlines constraints currently preventing more efficient risk mitigation. This paper suggests ways that sanctions, representing an increasingly vital, albeit contested, tool of EU foreign and security policy, could be used in a more prudent manner if a worsening humanitarian situation is to be avoided.     

Coercive or Corrosive: The Negative Impact of Economic Sanctions on Democracy

This article seeks to analyze the impact that sanctions have on democracy. We argue that economic sanctions worsen the level of democracy because the economic hardship caused by sanctions can be used as a strategic tool by the targeted regime to consolidate authoritarian rule and weaken the opposition. Furthermore, we argue that economic sanctions create new incentives for the political leadership to restrict political liberties, to undermine the challenge of sanctions as an external threat to their authority. Using time-series cross-national data (1972–2000), the findings show that both the immediate and longer‐term effects of economic sanctions significantly reduce the level of democratic freedoms in the target. The findings also demonstrate that comprehensive economic sanctions have greater negative impact than limited sanctions. These findings suggest that sanctions can create negative externalities by reducing the political rights and civil liberties in the targeted state.     

What determines earmarked funding to international development organizations? Evidence from the new multi-bi aid data

Earmarked aid to international organizations has quadrupled over the last two decades and now represents almost 20% of total aid. This paper introduces a new dataset on earmarked aid, which alternatively has been referred to as multi-bi, restricted, non-core or trust fund aid. The data make it possible to track the rise of the new aid channel over an extended time period and in greater detail regarding, e.g., the implementing multilateral organizations. The data include more than 100,000 earmarked projects of 23 OECD donors to 290 multilateral institutions from 1990 to 2012. We graphically illustrate the patterns in earmarked aid for all actors: donor governments and their aid-providing agencies, multilateral organizations, and recipient countries. We also highlight promising research questions that can be analyzed with the multi-bi data. In a first empirical application of the data, we analyze four suggested donor motives for earmarked aid at the donor-recipient level. Contrary to donor claims, we find that earmarked aid and bilateral aid target the same recipients. We also find evidence that some donors use earmarked aid to bypass recipient countries with weak governance. Overall, our explorative analysis suggests that earmarked aid serves many purposes and that donors use it in different ways. This calls for more fine-grained research on the reasons and implications for earmarked aid.