Multilateral Sanctions and Foreign Policy Success: Can Too Many Cooks Spoil the Broth?

Abstract

In this article, we consider the puzzle of whether unilateral or multilateral sanctions are more likely to be successful in changing a targeted state's behavior. Policymakers maintain that multilateral sanctioning efforts will be more likely to succeed, while the majority of empirical academic research suggests otherwise. We present an argument, based on multidimensional spatial models, to explain why multilateral sanctions may not be more effective than unilateral sanctions. We present the basic model and show that they can explain why, in general, multilateral sanctions fail more often than do unilateral sanctions. We also show that the model leads to additional, testable hypotheses. We conduct a simple empirical test of the major hypothesis produced by the spatial application and show that it is consistent with the historical record.