Authoritarian Responses to Foreign Pressure: Spending, Repression, and Sanctions

Abstract

This paper explores how international sanctions affect authoritarian rulers' decisions concerning repression and public spending composition, and how different authoritarian rulers respond to foreign pressure. If sanctions are assumed to increase the price of loyalty to the regime, then rulers whose budgets are not severely constrained by sanctions will tend to increase spending in those categories that most benefit their core support groups. In contrast, when constraints are severe due to reduced aid and trade, dictators are expected to greatly increase their levels of repression. Using data on regime types, public expenditures and spending composition as well as on repression levels , we show that the empirical patterns conform well to our theoretical expectations. Single-party regimes, when targeted by sanctions, increase spending on subsidies and transfers which largely benefit more substantial sectors of the population and especially the urban classes. Likewise, military regimes increase their expenditures on goods and services, which include military equipment and soldiers' and officers' wages. Conversely, personalist regimes reduce spending in all categories, especially capital expenditures, while increasing repression much more than other regime types when targeted by sanctions.

Mind the Gap: State Capacity and the Implementation of Human Rights Treaties

“…See Hafner-Burton andTsutsui 2005;Hafner-Burton, Tsutsui, and Meyer 2008;andHathaway 2002 and 125. See Abouharb and Cingranelli 2007;Escribà-Folch 2012;Murdie and Davis 2010;Peksen 2009 andand Wood 2008. agreements on human rights performance assume that countries have the capacity to respond to such punishments and inducements. 126 But when noncompliance stems from state weakness, sanctions are likely to be perverse, serving to weaken further the targeted government's capacities and hence undermine its ability to redress human rights problems.…”

“…33 Likewise, lowcapacity democracies may be willing but unable to implement treaties owing to a 25. See Abouharb and Cingranelli 2007;Escribà-Folch 2012;Peksen 2009;and Wood 2008. 26.…”

European Democracy Promotion in Crisis: Conflicts of Objectives, Neglected External–Domestic Interactions and the Authoritarian Backlash

“…Besides election management, autocrats have also developed domestic response strategies to international sanctions in case of electoral fraud and other human rights violations. As outlined by Escribà‐Folch (), rulers whose budgets are not severely constrained by sanctions tend to increase spending in those categories that most benefit their core support groups. When budget constraints are severe, dictators are more likely to increase repression and thereby secure their survival.…”

Not all dictators are equal

“…Surprisingly, existing research analyzing the imposition of sanctions has almost exclusively focused on structural variables -be they related to the sender or to the target, or to the dyadic relationship between the two 3 -and has neglected the actual autocratic behavior of the target (see for instance Cox & Drury, 2006;Drezner, 1998;Hafner-Burton & Montgomery, 2008;Lektzian & Souva, 2007;Nooruddin, 2002;Whang, 2010). 4 In addition, there has been puzzlingly little discussion on whether sanctions are mostly used as a reaction to authoritarian stability or democratic decline (Escribà-Folch & Wright, 2010;Escribà-Folch, 2012). Some authors state that sanctions are usually used as a reaction to drastic democratic deterioration (Laakso, Kivimäki & Seppänen, 2007), whereas others suggest that the most severe repressors are selected in the first place (Peksen & Drury, 2010;Peksen, 2009;Wood, 2008).…”