Do Economic Sanctions Destabilize Country Leaders?

Economic Sanctions and Political Repression: Assessing the Impact of Coercive Diplomacy on Political Freedoms

“…According to the relative deprivation theory (Gurr 1968), the growing frustration within the society resulting from economic hardship is expected to lead to more organized violence against the state. Earlier empirical evidence finds that countries under economic coercion are more likely to experience anti-government violence in the forms of protest and demonstrations (Allen 2004;Marinov 2005). As economic sanctions undermine political stability by causing more violence and political dissent, it is likely that the government will resort to physical force and repression to maintain the status quo (Peksen 2009).…”

“…Marinov (2005) finds that economic sanctions destabilize political leaders, while Allen (2004) shows that sanctions, especially in more democratic countries, cause more political violence such as riots and demonstrations. In these studies, one of the major justifications of why sanctions might destabilize domestic politics is linked with the disproportionate negative economic cost of sanctions on civilians that leads to greater dissatisfaction and violent protests against the regime.…”

Does Foreign Aid Support Autocrats, Democrats, or Both?

“…Event history models are appropriate for analyzing phenomena that exhibit time dependency, and studies show that leader survival is dependent on the length of time leaders have been in office (Bienen and Van de Walle 1991; Bueno de Mesquita and Siverson 1995; Chiozza and Goemans 2004;Marinov 2005). To avoid making arbitrary assumptions about the form of this dependency, we follow Box-Steffensmeier and Jones (2004) and use a conditional logit Cox model, a discrete-time formulation of the Cox proportional hazards model.…”

“…For presentational convenience, we recode the Polity index so that it also ranges from 0 to 1, with 1 representing the most democratic systems. Previous work shows that leadership turnover is higher in democracies than in autocracies; hence the democracy coefficient should be positive (Chiozza and Goemans 2004;Marinov 2005).…”

Myanmar Impasses: Alternatives to Isolation and Engagement?

“…In this connection, a recent study by Nikolay Marinov concludes that between the period 1947 to 2001 sanctions alone caused 70 leadership changes in autocratic regimes. He contends that the cases of some of the world's most vicious regimes such as Cuba, Iraq, and North Korea, where sanctions have seemed only to empower dictators, are highly atypical exceptions (Marinov, 2005). Burma likewise seems to be an atypical case, where the best hope one can have for political reform is through incremental change given decades of impasses in the past.…”