This book is structured in three parts, each consisting of two chapters. The first part reviews the debates in research on economic sanctions and on autocratic regimes, and presents the main variables mentioned in these debates. The second part provides an analytical framework for the impact of economic sanctions on political regimes. The third part tries to reply to the original research question.
The first part of the book, consisting of Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, searches in the literature for the most relevant factors for the research question. Chapter 2 ←41 | 42→starts with a historical overview on the development of economic sanctions and presents the debates that shaped sanctions research in the past decades: first, the debate about the unintended impact of sanctions on state and society, second, the debate about the effectiveness of sanctions. The last part is particularly important because similar variables might be relevant for the present research question. Among those variables are design-related variables (such as economic costs to the target, duration, targeted measures, threats, symbolic use) and state-related variables (such as institutions in the sender and target state, international institutions, multilateral versus unilateral sanctions, allies, issue). The chapter ends with a look at the autocratization debate, and at potential reasons of the alleged democratic backlash in the last decade.
Chapter 3 builds hypotheses. It extracts from the previous literature review the most likely variables which may explain why some economic sanctions have a negative impact on the level of democracy in the target state but others not. Some of these variables refer to the design of sanctions, some to the political system of the target state, and others to economic characteristics of the target state. After each variable, a hypothesis is formulated. The chapter also includes a detailed definition of the dependent variable democracy, based on a continuous scale. The chapter combines literature, examples, and debates.
The second part of the book is the analytical core and provides the theoretical and analytical tools for the last part. Chapter 4 introduces the causal mechanism which connects international economic sanctions and domestic autocratization. First, it presents the players – leadership, winning coalition, population – then, it presents the “market of political survival.” According to the market analogy, political life can be seen as a market in which goods are exchanged. The chapter includes the variables identified in the previous chapter and ends with modeling the game of survival. After establishing a sound theoretical model, Chapter 5 selects and quantifies the cases, operationalizes all variables, gives information on the limitations of the study and ends with the econometric model.
The third part of the book evaluates the results. Chapter 6 presents the findings. It starts with the main model, includes extensive robustness checks, and interprets the findings in line with the hypotheses established in Chapter 3. Chapter 7 presents metatheoretical implications for the academic sanctions debate (ontological, methodological, epistemological), provides research recommendations (related to sanctions research and regime research) and policy recommendations, reflects the use of economic statecraft, and concludes with a list of lessons learned.
The appendix includes an overview of the cases of economic sanctions in the last decades that was used for the database, a list of types and goals of sanctions, and the code and results of the quantitative analysis.
←42 | 43→
12 Brooks 2002, p. 46.
13 Andreas 2005, p. 357.
14 Kaempfer, Lowenberg, & Mertens 2004, p. 46.
15 Cortright & Lopez 2000c, p. 75.
16 Brooks 2002, p. 47.
17 Andreas 2005, p. 357.
18 Brooks 2002, pp. 46–47.
19 Andreas 2005, p. 341.
20 Andreas 2005, p. 335.
21 Woodward 1995b, p. 294.
22 Kaempfer, Lowenberg, & Mertens 2004, p. 39.
23 Woodward 1995a; cf. Peksen 2017, p. 219.
24 Licht 1995.
25 Licht 1995, p. 158.
26 Woodward 1995b, p. 149; Cortright & Lopez 2000c, pp. 75–76.
27 Licht 1995, p. 159.
28 Qtd. in Filkins 2013.
29 For a general overview, cf. Nephew 2018.
30 Alfoneh 2013.
31 Giumelli & Ivan 2013, p. 13.
32 Patterson 2013, p. 135.
33 Bergeijk 2015, p. 51.
34 Alfoneh 2013, p. 30; Ehteshami 2009, p. 14.
35 Qtd. in Kálnoky 2011.
36 Alfoneh 2013, p. 165.
37 Bazoobandi 2015, p. 64.
38 Alfoneh 2013, pp. 165–191.
39 Bazoobandi 2015, pp. 61–62.
40 Bergeijk 2015, pp. 53, 56; Dizaji & Bergeijk 2013, p. 734.