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.     

相对集中行政处罚的主体失范及模式转换

行政执法主体资格是实施行政处罚的核心问题之一。目前,集中行政处罚全部相关权力的模式容易造成集中处罚主体的失范,其解决之道在于转换集中行政处罚权的模式———以“行政分权”及“行政处罚司法化”为目标,向政府法制部门集中行政处罚决定权。     

“受过行政处罚入罪”规定之证成

2013年以来我国刑事司法解释有一明显趋势,即将行为人曾经受过行政处罚的事实作为定罪情节,纳入犯罪成立与否的考量之中。对这一现象,我国刑法学界多从刑事犯罪行为与行政违法行为"质"的差异,或者客观主义刑法观的角度出发予以否定。但是,在我国"定性+定量"的刑事立法模式下,刑事犯罪行为与行政违法行为以"量"的差异为主、质的差异为辅,行政违法性"量的累加"可以产生刑事违法性。"受过行政处罚入罪"的规定综合考虑了行为的客观危害程度和行为人的主观可谴责性程度,不仅不违反罪刑法定原则、禁止重复评价原则和责任主义原则等定罪时应坚持的一些基本原则,还有利于弥补劳动教养废除后的制度空白,调整我国"结果本位"的刑法结构,实现行政处罚与刑事处罚的有效衔接。     

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.     

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.     

Costs of Alternative Sanctions in Hungary

ABSTRACT. The author calculated the specific costs of executing probation and community service orders. In addition, she attempted to design indicators that help determine the amount of effort probation officers make to perform their duties. In Hungary, the probation service is under the supervision of the judicial system; therefore, it does not have a separate budget. The author calculated the costs of alternative sanctions in multiple steps. The study found that in 1997 the costs of performing probation orders amounted to HUF 10,645 (± 47 Euro) per case per year whereas those of performing community service totalled HUF 13,395 (± 60 Euro). The analysis established that fines imposed are collected and utilised by the courts themselves. This implies a risk, namely, that judicial sanctioning practice may be determined not only by penal law but also by financial considerations. The author claims that this casts a different light on the recent punishment practice under which imprisonment (and its non-suspended form, in particular) has been increasingly replaced by fines rather than community sanctions.     

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.     

Targeted Versus Conventional Economic Sanctions: What Is at Stake for Human Rights?

ABSTRACT

The adverse impact of economic sanctions on human rights is well documented in the literature (Peksen 2009; Wood 2008) and so are the consequences of sanctions for democracy (Peksen and Drury 2009, 2010) and for the survival of leaders (Escribà-Folch & Wright 2010; Marinov 2005). Using data from the Targeted Sanctions Consortium (Biersteker, Eckert, Tourinho, and Hudákóva 2013), we analyze whether sanctions that target segmented groups within the leadership fare any better with respect to human rights protection. The analysis focuses on the universe of targeted sanctions against African countries, between 1992 and 2008, and finds that the adverse impact of this coercive instrument—though unintended—is not statistically distinguishable from the adverse consequences already identified by the literature with respect to conventional sanctions. All else equal, the protection of rights to physical integrity (the right to life and the prohibition of torture) in the targeted country is 1.74 times more likely to worsen under an episode of targeted sanction when compared to a situation where there is no sanction. We propose a signaling model wherein a targeted leader is perceived by the opposition as weakened by the sanctions, which leads to more protest and repression. Higher levels of human rights violations follow.     

Unpredictable and monetized contact with the police: Race,avoidance behaviors,and modified activity spaces

Exponential growth in order maintenance policing and associated misdemeanor sanctions have led to disproportionate consequences for people of color. Using data from qualitative interviews with individuals in the metropolitan St. Louis, Missouri, region, the current study documents the racialized and monetized nature of police contact. This work extends extant scholarship by considering how minor contact with the police shapes individual avoidance behaviors and activity spaces, places where people work and live. We consider how the combination of monetary sanctions, warrants, incarceration, and overpolicing in the region affects avoidance behaviors, particularly for people of color. Our findings suggest that the frequently unpredictable nature of police contacts and the parochial and often profit-focused structure of policing organizations in the region leads individuals to modify the ways in which they move through the region and, for some, to isolate. Narratives reflect the need for constant calibration of behaviors and decisions, as well as the legacy that police contact and monetary sanctions can have on everyday routines.     

Punishing environmental crimes: An empirical study from lower courts to the court of appeal

We analyze judicial policy lines concerning the punishment of environmental crime using a unique European dataset of individual criminal cases, including case‐specific information on offenses and offenders. We investigate policy choices made by lower criminal courts, as well as their follow‐up by the relevant court of appeal. The sanctioning policy of the courts has proven to be varied as well as consistent. Judges carefully balance effective and suspended penalties, most often using them cumulatively, but in specific cases opting to use them as substitutes. Overall, both judges in lower and appeal courts balance environmental law and classic criminal law and aim at protecting individuals and their possessions as well as the environment.