Not all dictators are equal: coups, fraudulent elections, and the selective targeting of democratic sanctions
In: Journal of peace research, S. 1-15
Abstract
Since the end of the Cold War, Western powers have frequently used sanctions to fight declining levels of democracy
and human rights violations abroad. However, some of the world's most repressive autocracies have never been subjected
to sanctions, while other more competitive authoritarian regimes have been exposed to repeated sanction episodes.
In this article, we concentrate on the cost–benefit analysis of Western senders that issue democratic sanctions,
those which aim to instigate democratization, against authoritarian states. We argue that Western leaders weight
domestic and international pressure to impose sanctions against the probability of sanction success and the sender's
own political and economic costs. Their cost–benefit calculus is fundamentally influenced by the strength of trigger
events indicating infringements of democratic and human rights. Western sanction senders are most likely to respond
to coups d'e´tat, the most drastic trigger events, and tend to sanction vulnerable targets to a higher extent than stable
authoritarian regimes. Senders are also more likely to sanction poor targets less integrated in the global economy and
countries that do not align with the Western international political agenda, especially in responding to 'weaker' trigger
events such as controversial elections. The analysis is carried out using a new dataset of US and EU sanctions
against authoritarian states in the period 1990–2010.
Problem melden