Are democratic sanctions really counterproductive?

Previous research has shown that sanctions have a negative impact on the level of democracy in targeted authoritarian countries. This runs counter to substantive comparative literature on democratization which finds that economic stress is connected with regime collapse and democratic liberalization. To solve this puzzle, we focus on the effects of “democratic sanctions” (those that explicitly aim to promote democracy) which have become the most common type of sanction issued against authoritarian states. We introduce a new data set of imposed sanctions in the period 1990–2010 that clearly separates sanctions according to the explicit goal of the sender. Our cross-sectional time-series analysis demonstrates that although sanctions as a whole do not generally increase the level of democracy, there is in fact a significant correlation between democratic sanctions and increased levels of democracy in targeted authoritarian countries. A fundamental mechanism leading to this outcome is the increased instability of authoritarian rule as democratic sanctions are significantly associated with a higher probability of regime and leadership change.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Targeted Sanctions in a World of Global Finance

This is the golden age of economic statecraft—and the study of economic statecraft. This is in large part due to the evolution of economic coercion from trade embargoes to targeted financial sanctions. Targeted financial sanctions are attractive because they can generate economic costs similar to those of more comprehensive sanctions, with fewer negative externalities. Over time, however, the intersection of economic sanctions with globalized capital markets will provoke three interesting research questions. First, do financial sanctions spare a target country’s population from negative humanitarian and human rights outcomes? Second, to what extent are financial sanctions an exercise in learning by both targets and senders? Third, will the United States’ use of financial sanctions trigger blowback against US primacy in the international financial system? These last two questions offer the prospect to linking research on economic statecraft with larger questions of international security and global political economy.     

Biased Sanctions? Methodological Change in Economic Sanctions Reconsidered and Its Implications

We investigate the influence of case selection and (re)coding for two vintages of a key resource for research on economic sanctions: the Peterson Institute database reported in Hufbauer et al. (second edition in 1990 and third edition in 2007, often identified by their abbreviations HSE and HSEO). The Peterson Institute has not transparently reported about these changes. These changes make it more likely to find sanction success. A multivariate probit analysis establishes upward bias related to modest policy change, duration, and cost to target and downward bias for regime change, military impairment, companion policies, and cost to the sender.     

Foreign policy begins at home: the local origin of support for US democracy promotion

ABSTRACT

Citizens hold opinions about what kinds of foreign policy their government should pursue. Because foreign policy often has geographically specific domestic consequences, we expect opinions to vary with the locality of its impact. In this article, we examine whether individual support for US foreign policy to promote democracy abroad depends on exactly where the policy’s domestic impact will occur. We expect individuals to favor policies that bestow local benefits while opposing those that impose local costs. Accordingly, we argue that support for proposed democracy aid grants will be higher when such aid benefits local firms and organizations. Conversely, we expect that opposition to proposed economic sanctions in the form of development aid cuts will be higher when the associated domestic costs stemming from lost jobs fall locally. Using the results from an original survey experiment, we find evidence that a positive local impact of aid increases support for and reduces opposition to democracy promotion, while a negative local impact of sanctions reduces indifference and increases opposition to punitive policy in the case of democratic backsliding.     

Democratic sanctions meet black knight support: revisiting the Belarusian case

Democracy promotion through economic sanctions has become commonplace. Previous studies argue that an important challenge to the effectiveness of democratic sanctions is the contravening support of black knights. However, these studies underestimate conflicting interests between the target and its black knight. In this paper, I propose a bargaining model for understanding how targets obtain support from black knights. The target’s main source of bargaining power is its threat to defect from the black knight and obtain support from an international rival. However, the credibility of this threat decreases with democratic sanctions because they hinder cooperation with a likely source of support, namely the sender. Therefore, targets take steps towards democracy to improve their bargaining position relative to the black knight. To probe my argument, I conduct a deep single case study of EU sanctions against Belarus between 2004 and 2016 with Russia as a black knight. Sanctions should have no effect in this paradigmatic case of black knight support. Yet, there is substantial evidence that democratic sanctions have increased the cost of electoral fraud and state repression in Belarus. This indicates that the conflicting interests of targets and their black knights provide windows of opportunity for democracy promotion.     

Revolutionary Pathways: Leaders and the International Impacts of Domestic Revolutions

How much and in what ways do individual leaders matter for international politics? This article sheds new light on these questions by considering the consequences of domestic revolutions in international relations. We argue that revolutions have international effects due to two separate pathways, one associated with the event and one associated with the new leader’s administration. In the first pathway, a revolutionary event disrupts established relationships and perceptions, creating uncertainty both within the state and abroad. In the second pathway, revolutions put individuals into office who are more willing to challenge the status quo and who have publicly committed to a sustained shift in policies during their administration. These two distinct pathways suggest that the important question about revolutions is not whether leaders or events matter most but rather the conditions under which they matter. Consequently, we studied these pathways on three phenomena: international economic sanctions, domestic economic growth, and interstate alliances. We find that revolutionary events have a short-term negative effect on domestic economic growth, while revolutionary leaders have a long-term effect on the probability that a revolutionary state is targeted for sanctions. Both the revolutionary leader and the revolution’s immediate events alter the state’s international alliances. Our findings suggest that no single level of analysis completely dominates, and the answer depends on the outcome of interest.     

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.     

International Signaling and Economic Sanctions

Do economic sanctions serve international signaling purposes? A fully structural statistical model that employs a signaling game as a statistical model is used to investigate the existence of signaling effects of sanctions. Estimation results suggest that sanctions fail to work as a costly signal. The cheapness of sanctions prevents a target state from being able to distinguish a resolute sender state from a sender who is bluffing. When sanctions are imposed, a target rarely updates its initial evaluation of the sender state’s resolve, much less than when a military challenge is observed.     

More Flies with Honey: Positive Economic Linkage in German Ostpolitik from Bismarck to Kohl

The existing literature on economic sanctions has rarely addressed the key question of comparing the effectiveness of positive and negative sanctions. It is the contention of this study that positive sanctions can potentially be more effective, even in cases where contentious "high politics" issues are being negotiated, relations between the states concerned are tense and militarized, and the state being targeted with sanctions has substantial military power. This assertion will be tested in a set of case studies drawn from German-Polish and German-Russian/Soviet relations from the nineteenth century to the present. It will be shown that positive sanctions can be used effectively, both as "specific" sanctions to influence a target state on one particular issue, and as "general" sanctions, which aim to change the state's behavior as a whole in a more slow and subtle process.     

Threatening Sanctions When Engagement Would Be More Effective: Attaining Better Human Rights in China

Leaders use both coercion and engagement as leverage against other nations. Recent literature suggests economic sanctions are more effective than deployed sanctions to attain intended foreign policy goals. This paper examines a case of threatened coercion—the threat to remove China's most favored nation (MFN) status following the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989—where engagement would have produced better human rights in China. We show that the American threats to sanction China were counterproductive, while cooperative statements and MFN renewal proved to have a more beneficial impact on Beijing's human rights policies. This paper suggests that economic sanction threats are not directly linked to China's human rights behaviors. Instead, China uses accommodations to manipulate diplomatic relations with the U.S. As a result, engagement with China would have been a more productive policy when dealing with human rights issues.     

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.     

Is democracy about redistribution?

Some scholars champion broad conceptualizations of democracy where distribution of economic resources is an integral part, whereas several prominent arguments drawing on narrower conceptualizations of democracy still assume that progressive redistribution is central to democratic politics. We empirically analyse individual opinions on whether progressive taxation and redistribution are among democracy's central characteristics. While many citizens around the world associate democracy with redistribution, we find that surprisingly few consider redistribution among the most central characteristics of democracy. We further analyse what factors affect individuals’ propensity to consider redistribution among democracy's most important features. Running multi-level models, we find that having lived under a communist regime and ? although less robust – currently living under democracy make individuals less likely to hold this notion. However, individuals with more to gain from progressive redistribution (that is, little education and belonging to lower classes) are more likely to hold it. We discuss how our findings help shed light on two puzzles in comparative politics; (I) why do democracies not promote more redistributive policies than autocracies, and (II) why is there no net relationship between income inequality and democratization?     

冷战后美国对缅甸政策及近期变化

自1988年缅甸发生政变、军人政权上台执政之后,美国就以“民主”、“人权”为由,对缅甸政府进行孤立、制裁,同时支持缅甸国内民主势力发展,企图以压促变,使缅甸政权更迭,进而建立一个符合美国利益的西方民主式国家。然而,20多年的制裁并未取得美国期望中的结果,中国以及中缅关系的快速发展却使美国感到巨大压力,因此美国调整对缅政策,接触与制裁并举,企图以此促成缅甸的变革,同时离间中缅关系。     

Foreign aid and political conditionality: Issues of effectiveness and consistency

This article examines the implementation of political conditionality by four official aid donors in the 1990s. It explores the aid sanctions taken globally to leverage improvements in respect of human rights and democratic principles, and assesses donor policy practice along two lines of investigation ‐ effectiveness and consistency. A main finding is the ineffectiveness of aid restrictions in contributing to political reforms in recipient countries. This is accounted for more by the weakness of measures imposed than by the strength of recipient governments, questioning the seriousness of donor intent in many cases. Regarding consistency, a pattern of selective and inconsistent policy application is revealed. The increased rhetorical support for democracy and human rights by northern governments post‐cold war has not led to a corresponding change towards the fair and equal treatment of all nations. The continued subordination of human rights and democracy to other foreign policy concerns, notably economic self‐interest, not only undermines policy credibility and legitimacy, but also limits impact and effectiveness. Donors themselves have introduced a normative dimension to aid policy. Yet if their own commitment to the principles of human rights and democracy is at best partial, they can hardly require development partners to abide by them in a manner that commands respect.     

How Democracies Respond to Terrorism: Regime Characteristics,Symbolic Power and Counterterrorism

While the academic study of counterterrorism has gained momentum in recent years, it still suffers from major theoretical weaknesses. One of the most prominent shortcomings is an absence of theories that can effectively explain the factors that shape the counterterrorism policies of democratic regimes. The present study attempts to fill this theoretical void in two ways. First, it proposes an analytical framework for a classification of counterterrorism policies. Second, it presents a theoretical framework that strives to uncover the factors that have influenced the struggle against domestic terrorism in democratic regimes. The analyses, which have used a unique and comprehensive dataset that documents counterterrorism policies in eighty-three democracies, show that the robustness of the regime's democratic foundations as well as the symbolic effect of terrorism are major forces in shaping the democratic response to it, while the direct impact of terrorism is less influential than assumed in the literature.     

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.     

欧美科技制裁协作的动力与分歧：基于欧盟的视角

科技制裁在持续的军事冲突中发挥着关键作用,在和平时期的地缘政治中也从未消失。欧盟与美国是最大的制裁实施者,双方的制裁协作在多个地区和领域产生了重要影响。虽然欧美科技制裁协作较为频繁,但欧盟和美国在制裁政策上仍存在诸多分歧。文章从欧美价值观、安全威胁和二级制裁这三个维度出发,剖析欧盟与美国进行科技制裁协作的动因与诱发分歧的因素,并选择俄罗斯、伊朗和中国这三个具有代表性和差异性的案例进行比较。欧盟与美国对俄罗斯的制裁协作水平最高;在伊朗案例中,二级制裁因素带来的欧美分歧较为突出;在中国案例中,欧美尚未达成明显的制裁共识。共同价值观、安全威胁的紧迫性、二级制裁压力等要素是促使欧盟参与美国科技制裁的重要动因。然而,不同的外交政策理念、安全认知的错位和二级制裁的反作用力也使欧美分歧难以弥合,大大削减了制裁效率。