“…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).…”