Coercion and Democracy: Symbolic Role of Economic Sanctions in the US

ECPR General Conference

Innsbruck

23 August 2022

Dawid Walentek

University of Warsaw

Background

• Rising popularity of economic sanctions
• US is the most frequent user of economic coercion
• Mean to achieve foreign policy objectives
• ... and address the concerns of voters

Literature

• Instrumental motivation
  • what are the conditions for success
  • very rich literature
  • Ang and Peksen, 2007; Bapat and Kwon, 2015; Jeong and Peksen, 2019; 2014; Giumelli, 2015; among others
• Symbolic motivation
  • what is the return for expressing morality
  • limited scholarship
  • Whang, 2011; quantitative work
  • McLean and Roblyer, 2017; Heinrich et al., 2017; experimental research

My objective

• Audience benefit
  • assesses whether US presidents observe a boost in popularity for imposition of economic sanctions
• Audience cost
  • Establish whether US presidents observe a decrease in popularity for empty threats
• Instrumental and Symbolic logic
  • Tests whether US voters are more likely to positively respond to a successful episodes of sanction imposition

Data & Methods

Data

• Replication of the study of Whang
  • new data (TIES)
• Twin problem of false conterfacutal
  • time trend
  • selection 

Data

• Unit of analysis
  • more than one event per month
  • different type of events per month
  • 624 presidency months
  • 558 policy decisions in 231 months
  • 393 months with neither an imposition nor a threat-only
  • 534 presidency months are either a lead or a lag
• Threshold ratio of imposition and threats (and also for success) is 0.5

Methods

• Diff-in-Diff with two-way fixed effect
  • president FE
  • electoral cycle FE
  • approval rating is the outcome variable
  • imposition is the treatment condition
  • threat-only is the control group
  • controls (unemployment, GDP growth & major war)
• Formal test of trend and decay
  • treatment & lag interactions
  • treatment & lead interactions
  • following Autor, 2003
• Diff-in-Diff-Diff for treatment heterogeneity resulting from successful imposition

Results & Discussion

Results at glance

• US presidents do not experience a boost in popularity after imposition of economic sanctions
• I do not observe a decrease in the approval ratings of US presidents following empty threats
• ​No additional benefit for successful imposition
• US president behave as if they are likely to observe a boost in approval ratings for imposition of sanctions

Results 

Discussion

• Limitations posed by the complex data structure
• Empirical test of the underpinning mechanism

Thank you