A realistic theory of economic sanctions should be built on the facts that sanctions are a game of issue linkage involving two or more issues, players may not know each other's preferences for the outcome of the game, and threatening sanctions may be as important as imposing sanctions as a strategy in international disputes. The threat and use of economic sanctions are modeled as a multistage game of two‐sided incomplete information between a target and a coercer. The threat stage is critically important for understanding the outcome of sanctions, and current empirical studies suffer from a case selection bias. Economic sanctions are likely to be imposed when they are not likely to succeed in changing the target's behavior. Sanctions that are likely to succeed will do so at the mere threat of sanctions. Despite the unlikely success of sanctions, coercers must sometimes impose sanctions, even after the threat of sanctions has failed to change the target's behavior.

When some voters have nonseparable preferences across multiple binary issues, majority rule may not select a Condorcet winning set of outcomes when one exists, and the social choice may be a Condorcet loser or Pareto-dominated by every other set of outcomes. We present an empirical example of one such paradox from voting on the Internet. We evaluate potential solutions to the problem of nonseparable preferences in referendums, including set-wise voting, sequential voting, and vote-trading. Sequential voting and vote-trading prevent the selection of Condorcet losers and universally Pareto-dominated outcomes. Legislatures facilitate sequential voting and vote-trading better than referendums, suggesting that referendums increase the quantity of participants in democratic decision-making but decrease the quality of participation.

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This paper develops a model of protest voting in which unsatisfied voters may abandon their most-preferred candidate even though he or she has a good chance of winning, in the hope that this signal of disaffection will lead to downstream improvements in that candidate’s performance. We use a spatial model to identify voters whose ideological profile makes protest voting an option, and an expected utility model to identify the conditions under which potential protest voters will in fact use their vote as a signaling device. Aggregate-level data provide suggestive evidence in the argument’s favor

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