Democratic Sanctions: Connecting the Democratic Peace and Economic Sanctions

Cox, Dan G.; Drury, A. Cooper

doi:10.1177/0022343306068104

Cited by 111 publications

(147 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…However, authoritarian backsliding can take many forms and different signs of democratic retreat are likely to cause varying levels of public and political attention. 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).…”

Section: Strategic Targeting Of Democratic Sanctionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Not all dictators are equal

Soest

Wahman

2014

Journal of Peace Research

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Since the end of the Cold War, Western powers have frequently used sanctions to fight declining levels of democracy and human rights violations abroad. However, some of the world’s most repressive autocracies have never been subjected to sanctions, while other more competitive authoritarian regimes have been exposed to repeated sanction episodes. In this article, we concentrate on the cost–benefit analysis of Western senders that issue democratic sanctions, those which aim to instigate democratization, against authoritarian states. We argue that Western leaders weight domestic and international pressure to impose sanctions against the probability of sanction success and the sender’s own political and economic costs. Their cost–benefit calculus is fundamentally influenced by the strength of trigger events indicating infringements of democratic and human rights. Western sanction senders are most likely to respond to coups d’état, the most drastic trigger events, and tend to sanction vulnerable targets to a higher extent than stable authoritarian regimes. Senders are also more likely to sanction poor targets less integrated in the global economy and countries that do not align with the Western international political agenda, especially in responding to ‘weaker’ trigger events such as controversial elections. The analysis is carried out using a new dataset of US and EU sanctions against authoritarian states in the period 1990–2010.

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Section: Strategic Targeting Of Democratic Sanctionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Not all dictators are equal

Soest

Wahman

2014

Journal of Peace Research

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“…The European Union and the United States have frequently implemented sanctions against authoritarian regimes in order to pressure these regimes to democratize (Cox and Drury 2006). Despite the fact that the UN cannot openly aim for regime change (Chapter VII), it has frequently used sanctions to achieve democratization.…”

Section: Wp 212/2013mentioning

confidence: 99%

Sanctions and Democratization in the Post-Cold War Era

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Wahman

2013

SSRN Journal

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Previous research, which has focused mostly on pre-1990 dynamics, has shown that sanctions have a negative impact on the level of democracy in targeted authoritarian countries. Given this finding, it is puzzling that democratization has become the most common goal of sanctions issued against authoritarian states. This paper studies how sanctions have affected democratization in targeted countries since the end of the Cold War and asks whether "democratic sanctions," those that explicitly aim to promote democracy, are in fact counterproductive. Contrary to the earlier research, this analysis demonstrates that sanctions do not generally decrease the level of democracy in targeted countries. Using a new data set covering sanctions for the period 1990-2010 and cross-sectional time-series analysis, the study shows that sanctions have an insignificant but positive democratic effect. More importantly, it finds that "democratic sanctions" have a statistically significant positive effect on democratic development in targeted countries. This positive outcome can be explained by the smaller selection effect associated with this specific sanction type. The high cost of conceding to "democratic sanctions" makes authoritarian regimes less likely to give in to senders' demands before sanctions are implemented. The high-cost argument is corroborated by a supplementary test that demonstrates that democratic sanctions in particular make authoritarian institutions and rulers more instable.

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“…12 A further argument is that accountability of democratic politicians to large constituencies gives them a greater incentive to conduct successful foreign policies and protect their citizens from the costs of war (Bueno de Mesquita et al, 9 See Nooruddin (2002), Lektzian and Souva (2003), Cox and Drury (2006), Goenner (2007) and Hafner-Burton and Montgomery (2008), whose contributions are discussed further in Section 2.…”

Section: Regime Type Culture and Economic Sanctionsmentioning

confidence: 99%