Why do we observe economic sanctions despite strong doubts regarding their effectiveness? While the symbolic use of sanctions is advanced as an alternative to the instrumental use explanation, no one has assessed this alternative explanation empirically. I investigate the symbolic use of sanctions for domestic political gain in the United States, assessing in particular the effect of sanctions imposition on US presidential approval ratings. Findings suggest that policymakers benefit from imposing sanctions through increased domestic support. This domestic political gain can present policymakers with an incentive to use sanctions as a low‐cost way of displaying strong leadership during international conflicts.
This article explores when and why sanction threats succeed in extracting concessions from the targeted country. We focus on two different, albeit not mutually exclusive, mechanisms that can explain the success of sanction threats. The first mechanism relates to incomplete information regarding the sanctioner's determination to impose sanctions and suggests that threats help to extract concessions by revealing the sanctioner's resolve. The second mechanism underscores the direct impact of common interest between the two countries and explains the success of sanction threats by the targeted country's greater dependence on this link between the two countries and the sanctioner's ability to exploit this dependence. We test the hypotheses using a new strategic structural estimator. Our results provide no evidence in favor of the informational hypothesis, while lending robust support for the coercive hypothesis.
What is the relationship between international cooperation and the success of economic sanctions? Although it is commonly assumed that international cooperation is an important condition for the effectiveness of sanctions, empirical results have been mixed. We focus on the role of the sanctioned country's major trading partners and develop a theoretical model that shows how their actions can affect the probability of sanctions success by raising or decreasing resistance costs to the sanctioned country. We then derive hypotheses from the theoretical model and test them using fully structural estimation. The empirical results lend support to the theoretical expectation that the sanctioner is more likely to succeed if it has the support of the sanctioned country's major trading partners. We also find that international cooperation may be less crucial if sanctions are imposed by the sanctioned country's main trading partner because such sanctions have a higher probability of success.What role does international cooperation play in the success of economic sanctions? A large body of sanctions literature has examined a variety of factors that contribute to the effectiveness of economic sanctions. Previous works have extensively explored sanctions costs to the sanctioning nation (that is, the sender) and ⁄ or the sanctioned nation (that is, the target), the impact of international organizations, trade linkages between the target and the sender, the target's stability, the length of the sanctions episode, the use of financial sanctions, and the levels of democracy in the sender and ⁄ or target nations (for example, Green Allen 2005). International cooperation has also been recognized as a factor important for the success of sanctions, but it has received less attention in the literature, and findings are mixed. Importantly, there is a striking disagreement between theoretical studies of international support for economic sanctions and their success, on one hand, and results of empirical analyses, on the other.This article focuses-on the role of third states in shaping sanctions outcomes and addresses contradictory theoretical and empirical findings. We argue that the target's major trading partners can influence the probability of the target's
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