Success of Economic Sanctions Threats: Coercion, Information and Commitment

Abstract

This study examines when and why threats of economic sanctions lead to the successful extraction of policy concessions. Scholars identified three (not mutually exclusive) hypotheses that explain the success of sanction threats: (a) the coercive, (b) the informational and (c) the public commitment hypothesis. The underpinning mechanisms for the hypotheses are, respectively, the economic cost of sanctions, uncertainty about the resolve of the sender and domestic audience cost for issuing empty threats. In this study, we offer an empirical test of the three hypotheses on threats effectiveness. In addition, we assess how variation in the three mechanisms affects the effectiveness of threats relative to imposed sanctions. For the expected economic cost, we use the TIES data. To measure uncertainty, we generate a network of diplomatic relations, based on Formal Alliance data, utilizing methods from complex network theory. To assess public commitment, we use the democracy score based on the POLITY IV data. Our results show that the effectiveness of threats strongly increases in an economic cost to the target; however, threats become increasingly effective relative to imposed sanctions for lower uncertainty and higher domestic audience cost.Cette étude examine les moments auxquels et les raisons pour lesquelles les menaces de sanctions économiques permettent de réussir à soutirer des concessions politiques. Des chercheurs ont identifié trois hypothèses (qui ne sont pas mutuellement exclusives) qui expliquent la réussite des menaces de sanctions: les hypothèses liées (a) à la coercition, (b) à l'information et (c) à l'engagement public. Les mécanismes sous-jacents à ces hypothèses sont respectivement: le coût économique des sanctions, l'incertitude concernant la détermination de l'auteur des menaces, et le coût pour le public national de l'émission de vaines menaces. Dans cette étude, nous proposons une mise à l'épreuve empirique des trois hypothèses sur l'efficacité des menaces. De plus, nous avons évalué la manière dont la KEYWORDS

Strategy Under Uncertainty: International Conflict and Variation in Information

“…It shows that uncertainty is a separate determinant next to domestic audience and economic cost in driving success of threats of coercion. This results is also in contrast with part of the crisis bargaining theory, where information and domestic audience cost were presented as a single determinant (Schultz, 1999(Schultz, , 2001Whang et al, 2013); yet, our finding is consistent with recent empirical evidence for the independent role of uncertainty in international conflict (Walentek et al, 2021). Here, we disentangle these mechanisms and show that they may work in parallel.…”

Coercion and Democracy: Symbolic Role of Economic Sanctions in the US

“…4 The updated TIES data set lists more sanction cases and information on empty threats of sanctions, unlike the first release of the TIES data used by Whang (2011). The additional data on threatenedonly and imposed sanctions allows us to address potential bias in previous research and elaborate the research design, offering threats-only as a counterfactual event to imposition of sanctionsan approach consistent with recent empirical research on economic coercion (Walentek et al, 2021;Gutmann et al, 2021) and a long-standing theoretical argument (Smith, 1995).…”

“…As a result, we should be careful about our ability to generate unbiased inference from only a "before and after" analysis of the effects of sanctions imposition on approval ratings. A remedy to this issue, rooted in sanctions scholarship (Walentek et al, 2021;Gutmann et al, 2021), is to employ threats-only of economic sanctions as a counterfactual. Both threatened-only and imposed sanction allow us to compare relatively close cases; namely -instances when a US president faced a foreign policy challenge that is exogenous (at first) to the popularity dynamic itself and can be addressed with economic coercion.…”

“…Given the experimental (McLean and Roblyer, 2017;Heinrich et al, 2017) and empirical (Whang, 2011) evidence for the presence of a domestic audience benefit for imposing an economic sanction, and indirect evidence for the presence of domestic audience cost for economic sanctions (Walentek et al, 2021), we should expect to observe directly a domestic audience cost for issuing empty threats of sanctions too, in the data on approval rates. While research has focused on the instrumental value of threats of economic sanctions (Drezner, 2003;Whang et al, 2013;Walentek et al, 2021) or inclusion of empty threats into the data on sanctions (Eaton and Engers, 1999;Fearon, 1994;Smith, 1995), the presence and size of the domestic audience cost of issuing an empty threat of economic sanction has not been studied. This allows us to pose the following question: (i) is there a domestic audience cost for issuing an empty threat of economic sanctions and, if yes, how large is it?…”

Characterizing neural phase-space trajectories via Principal Louvain Clustering

“…We therefore term this method PLC, for Principal Louvain Clustering. Louvain clustering [14] is a modularity optimization algorithm applicable to weighted graphs, and has been used to characterize spatiotemporal dynamics of railway traffic [13], clusters in air transport networks [15], diplomatic structures in formal alliance data [16] and atmospheric states [17].…”