Sanctions and Democratization in the Post-Cold War Era

Abstract

Previous research, mostly focusing on pre-1990 dynamics, has shown that sanctions have a negative impact on the level of democracy in targeted authoritarian countries. From this perspective, it might seem puzzling that democratization has become the most common goal for sanctions issued against authoritarian states, since the end of the Cold War. This paper studies how sanctions have affected democratization in targeted countries after the end of the Cold War, and asks whether “democratic sanctions”, those which explicitly aim at promoting democracy, are in fact counterproductive. When reassessing the democratic impact of sanctions in the post-Cold War period, this study comes to clearly more optimistic results than previous research. Using a new dataset, covering sanctions between 1990-2010 and cross-sectional time-series analysis, this study shows an insignificant, but positive democratic effect of sanctions. More interestingly, sanctions explicitly aimed at increasing the level of democracy, exert a significantly positive effect on the democratic development in targeted countries. This more positive outcome of “democratic sanctions” can be explained with a smaller selection effect associated with this specific sanction type. The high cost of sanction concession related to “democratic sanctions”, makes authoritarian regimes less likely to give in to senders’ demands before the implementation of sanctions.