Читать книгу Collateral Damage Autocracy? - Tobias Lechner - Страница 10

Abstract

Economic sanctions are a popular tool of modern foreign policy. However, they may have a negative collateral damage to the political system of the target state. The leader shifts the costs of sanctions from his supporters to the population and uses the opportunity to centralize power. Furthermore, the external threats enable him to blame enemies abroad for his (economic) mismanagement. Though anecdotal and empirical evidence supports the basic argument, it is not clear under which circumstances sanctions have an autocratizing effect. Newer data on sanctions and regimes enable to test the most plausible hypotheses. Several variables try to explain the negative impact of economic sanctions on the level of democracy: the economic costs of sanctions, a democratic goal of sanctions (sanctions designed for improving democracy), a personalist regime, the level of regime legitimacy, the level of economic vulnerability, and the level of development. All sanctions by the UN, the EU and the U.S. that were imposed between 1990 and 2015 are used for the quantitative analysis. Surprisingly, none of the sanctions variables had a negative impact on the level of democracy. Both economic costs and democratic goal correlate with a higher level of democracy, as well as the level of development. The analysis contributes with several key findings to the debate: Sanctions with high economic costs do not cause autocratization. Aid sanctions and arms embargoes correlate with a higher level of democracy; the type of sanction is crucial for its side-effects. Sanctions are not a binary variable and should not be used as such in quantitative analyses. Sanctions have a de jure goal and a de facto goal; an evaluation of sanctions that is only based on the de jure goal is misleading. In summary, sanctions are not as bad – and perhaps not as useless – as many fear.

Keywords: Economic sanctions; Coercive diplomacy; Regime types; Autocracies; Democratization

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