U.S. Economic Sanction Threats Against China: Failing to Leverage Better Human Rights

Abstract

Recent literature argues that economic sanction threats should be more successful because both sender and target have an incentive to resolve their dispute before entering into costly sanction. Testing this assertion is somewhat problematic because threats are essentially nonevents Fsanctions that were never deployed. This paper quantifies the U.S. threats to condition or revoke China's most favored nation status and shows that Washington's threats were not only ineffective but also coun-terproductiveFChinese accommodations decreased when the U.S. made acute threats but increased when Washington was cooperative. We conclude that for highly salient issues, sanction threats tend to be ineffective.Authors' note: We are indebted to

Success of economic sanctions threats: coercion, information and commitment

“…In addition, the type of issues at stake matters for the effectiveness of economic sanctions. Senders of economic sanctions are less likely to succeed for issues of high salience, for example, security-related matters (Ang and Peksen 2007;Drury and Li 2006;Li and Drury 2004;Morgan, Bapat, and Kobayashi 2014).…”

US Sanctions and Foreign Lobbying of the US Government

“…Similarly, targets would also be more determined to withstand foreign pressure over security and political issues (Morgan and Schwebach 1997; Drury and Li 2006; Ang and Peksen 2007). Because such issues are often politically salient in domestic politics, acquiescence to the external pressure would undermine their authority and even political survival (Peksen and Drury 2010).…”

SASCAT: Natural language processing approach to the study of economic sanctions

“… 1 An important point in the literature is that the economic costs a state bears and the political costs borne by the political agent or agents holding office should not be equated (Galtung, 1967; Tsebelis, 1990; Smith, 1996; Pape, 1997; Rowe, 2001). See also work by Allen (2008); Barry & Kleinberg (2015); Biersteker, Eckert & Tourinho (2016); Dashti-Gibson, Davis & Radcliff (1997); Drezner (2000); Drury & Li (2006); Early (2015); Escribà-Folch & Wright (2010); Grauvogel & von Soest (2010); Lektzian & Souva (2001); McLean & Whang (2010); Marinov (2005); Martin (1992); Miller (2014); Pape (1997); Peksen & Drury (2010); Peterson (2013); Farrell & Newman (2019); Jentleson (2022). …”