Sanctions

Does political finance reform reduce corruption? This study argues yes. It contends that reforms mitigating private money’s influence and increasing sanctions against corrupt behavior effectively lower corruption levels.

The authors ask which states condemned Russia at the UN and which imposed sanctions after the 2022 invasion, and whether regime type or trade relationships better predict those behaviors. Using an “opportunity and willingness” framing, the study compares democratic versus nondemocratic states’ propensity to issue substantive or symbolic condemnation and examines whether countries’ positions in international trade networks — including trade in fuels and dual‑use goods — predict who imposed sanctions. The paper reports results from multinomial logit models that use commodity trade data to distinguish fuels, dual‑use goods, and aggregate trade and evaluates whether close preexisting trade ties to Russia explain condemnation or sanctions.

This paper asks whether US economic sanctions during the Trump presidency reduced support for Iran’s government or instead produced a "rally-around-the-flag" effect among Iranian influencers and their audiences. Using a large-scale supervised machine-learning analysis of nearly two million tweets from more than 1,000 Iranian influencers, the authors compare reactions to comprehensive versus targeted sanctions and examine variation by political faction and by which entity was targeted.

This article asks how domestic factors affect US presidents’ decisions to lift sanctions and whether they choose different exit routes (for example, capitulation) depending on political pressure. Using a novel dataset of US sanctions from 1990–2018 combined with interviews and anecdotal practitioner evidence, the author links presidents’ political standing and congressional oversight to variation in the timing and manner of sanctions termination.

The authors ask whether distinct state actions—learning demands, compliance demands, and sanctions—affect how citizens perceive welfare policy, beneficiaries, and the administering agency. Using a factorial survey experiment framed around German unemployment benefits, the study aims to distinguish which kinds of administrative burdens produce shifts in policy support, spending expectations, and legitimacy judgments. The piece contributes by unpacking heterogeneous policy-feedback effects across conceptually different state actions rather than treating administrative burden as a single phenomenon.

Economic sanctions research suggests that sanctioned countries' overall economic costs tend to be low. This article argues, however, that even minor financial impacts can force governments to reallocate budgets significantly.

Signaling games help explain political crises, but they often have multiple possible outcomes. This creates a problem for using theory with data.

Following Burundi's 2015 political crisis, donors imposed economic sanctions and suspended all budget support to the national government. The conventional expectation is that removing donor budget support will force painful spending cuts and political concessions by making fiscal commitments untenable. This article argues that this expectation is overly simplistic because governments can use fiscal levers other than aid to preserve spending.

This article argues that economic sanctions often undermine democracy in targeted states. Economic hardship produced by sanctions can be leveraged by incumbent leaders to consolidate authoritarian rule, weaken opposition forces, and justify restrictions on political liberties by portraying sanctions as an external threat to regime survival.

This study asks whether economic sanctions serve international signaling purposes. A fully structural statistical model that employs a signaling game as a statistical model is used to investigate whether sanctions produce credible signaling effects between states.

Scholarly findings on what makes economic sanctions effective are mixed. Two potential reasons for inconsistent results are examined: the frequent omission of threats (as distinct from imposed sanctions) and sensitivity of results to model specification. The analysis treats threats and imposed sanctions separately and uses a systematic sensitivity-checking approach to reduce model dependence.

This article asks how foreign direct investment (FDI) affects the use of economic coercion and argues that the effect depends on how FDI enters a host economy. The relationship between economic interdependence and statecraft is not monotonic because different FDI entry modes shift the relative costs of economic disruption onto different actors.

Recent work argues that democracies are generally more vulnerable to economic coercion than authoritarian regimes, yet most sanctions target nondemocratic states. This article reconciles that puzzle by arguing that authoritarians are resilient to sanctions most of the time—but become unusually vulnerable during specific "windows of opportunity" created by domestic instability.