Political Relations, Leader Stability, and Economic Coercion

Abstract

Countries use economic sanctions as a way to force their opponents to make policy concessions. Such external pressure may, as the designers of sanctions often intend, affect the degree of domestic support for the target's political leaders. It may even threaten the leaders' survival in office. We investigate how these dual pressures-preference for policy concessions and concern about target leaders' political future-shape the use of sanctions in the context of political relations between the sanctioning and sanctioned countries. The political relations between the two countries matter because a decline in the likelihood of the target leader's political survival results in a cost for the sanctioner when the target is a friendly regime and generates a benefit when the targeted regime is an adversary. Therefore, we argue, and show statistically, that economic coercion is more likely for friendly governments when they are politically stable and unfriendly governments when they are politically vulnerable. We illustrate our causal mechanism using declassified primary sources for two case studies of US sanctions against Chile.

Economic sanctions outcomes: An information-driven explanation

“…Source: compiled by the author More recent analyses of smart sanctions have highlighted the importance of actors' penetration into the target's political community (McLean & Radtke, 2018;Connoly, 2016;Major, 2012). Senders with higher access, more frequent and dense networks, in target states have higher likelihoods of success when sanctioning targets compared to sanctions with low access.…”

Post-Cold War sanctioning by the EU, the UN, and the US: Introducing the EUSANCT Dataset

“…Peksen and Peterson (2016) extend this argument and regard the imposition of sanctions with respect to third actors. Besides economic factors, trigger events (von Soest and Wahman, 2015b) and political relations with the target (McLean and Radtke, 2018) also matter for the imposition of sanctions. However, there is less research on the choice of the respective sanction type, which may also have an impact on the effectiveness of sanctions.…”

“…Peksen, 2009; Peksen and Drury, 2010), the publication of this and some other studies of the early 2000s marked a turning point at which systematic studies started to examine the effects of sanctions on certain outcomes rather than evaluating solely the effectiveness of the coercive measures. McLean and Radtke (2018), for example, show in this vein that senders are more likely to target stable (vulnerable) governments with whom they entertained friendly (unfriendly) relations prior to the sanction episode. Based on a new dataset, von Soest and Wahman (2015a) also find that democratic sanctions (i.e.…”

Employment effects of economic sanctions in Iran

“…The study of the effects of economic sanctions has attracted considerable attention among economists and political scientists in recent years. 1 Prior studies have mainly focused on the effects on human rights (Gutmann et al, 2020;Peksen, 2009;Wood, 2008), government and political leader stability (Allen, 2008;Marinov, 2005;McLean and Radtke, 2018), the level of democracy (Adam and Tsarsitalidou, 2019;Dizaji and van Bergeijk, 2013;Peksen and Drury, 2010), and on conflict intensity (Hultman and Peksen, 2017).…”