The Domestic Politics of International Sanctions
Year: 2013
Type: preprint
Abstract: Recent research on sanction efficacy in dictatorships finds that autocrats are largely immune from the negative effects of sanctions. Their focus on leadership change, however, is problematic in that it is a rare event which often does not reflect regime instability in dictatorships, where regularized rotation of leaders atop the regime is a primary method for maintaining regime stability. Effective economic sanctions increase the risk of leadership failure by requiring targeted autocrats to make a tradeoff between creating cabinet positions to coopt external support and relieving ministers to pre-empt internal coups. Changes in the composition of the cabinet produces ex post volatility, which in turn leads to ex ante uncertainty on the part of cabinet members about their access to future rents. This provides them an incentive to support an alternative leader, regime or political system. Using an data on over 100 sanctions in 115 countries between 1971-2000, I find that economic sanctions, on average, have a positive effect on cabinet size and volatility in dictatorships.
Source: SSRN Electronic Journal
Author: Muhammed Y. Idris
Institution: Pennsylvania State University
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1562274287