Economic sanctions, domestic political institutions, and United States drug policy: The use and effectiveness of economic coercion

In this dissertation I use a general framework regarding the importance of domestic politics in international relations to address two important topics in the study of economic coercion; the initiation and the success of economic sanctions. The first part of the dissertation focuses on the initiation of sanctions. In this section, I perform an empirical analysis including all sanctions cases from 1950–1989. The findings show that domestic political institutions influence the use of economic sanctions and supports the idea of an “economic peace” among democratic states, at least regarding the use of economic sanctions. While democratic states are more likely to use economic sanctions than autocratic states, they are less likely to use them against another democracy.; The second part of the dissertation focuses on the success of economic sanctions. A game theoretic model is developed and used to derive several hypotheses regarding the success of sanctions at the threat and initiation stage. These hypotheses are tested using a strategic probit model (STRAT) and data gathered on the US sanctions against countries that do not cooperate in the fight against the trafficking of illicit narcotics. The findings show that threats of sanctions have tended to be more successful than their implementation, leading to a bias against findings of success in studies that only analyze implemented sanctions. This helps answer one of the most puzzling questions in the study of economic sanctions; why do states continue to use sanctions when they are so likely to be unsuccessful? The simple answer proposed by this study is that states continue to use sanctions because they expect to be successful. However, because most of the success of sanctions takes place at the threat stage, traditional estimates of success based on implemented sanctions are likely to be biased downward. A second important finding is that when the potential target of sanctions is a democracy, both the sender and the target are more likely to back down at the threat stage. This helps account for the empirical finding in the first part of the dissertation that democracies are less frequently the target of sanctions.