Reputation or Interaction: What Drives Cooperation on Economic Sanctions

Dawid Walentek

University of Warsaw

d.walentek@uw.edu.pl

What drives Cooperation?

• Sanctions increasingly popular
• Multilateral sanctions (increasingly) popular too
• Sanctions rarely work
• Multilateral sanctions perform marginally better
   
• Under what conditions states cooperate on economic sanctions?

Literature

Scholarship focuses predominantly on effectiveness of multilateral sanctions (e.g. Bapat & Morgan 2009, Drezner 2000). With a notable exception  (Martin 1992,1993); however, with two aspects calling a revision: data and theory.

Theory: Cournot

• Two senders, one target
• Senders compete in quantity for trade with the target
• Rational choice
• Sanctions mean no trade
• two-on-two (yes, it's a prisoners' dilemma)

Theory: Evolution

• Repeated interaction – "I will do to you what you have done to me"
• Reputation – "I will do you what you have done to others"
• Two hypotheses

Research Design

• TIES data set for cases of sanctions
• Cases with a primary sender only
• Main variables
  • DV: binary multilateral (TIES)
  • IV: sum of the memberships in IOs during the sanction year (CoW IGO)
  • IV: average past commitment to sanction regimes (TIES)
• Logistic regression

Results

• Both IVs of main interest (past commit & numIO) appear statistically significant
• Controls largerly significant and pointing in the expected direction
• Robustness: OLS and presence of public threats

Conclusion

• Two mechanism (interaction & reputation) – rooted in a single framework (Cournot) – appear to systematically influence cooperation on economic sanctions
• Coercive cooperation in international relations

Thank you

Dawid Walentek

University of Warsaw

d.walentek@uw.edu.pl