PONARS Eurasia
  • About
    • Contact
    • List of Members
    • Ukraine Experts
    • About Membership
    • Executive Committee
  • Policy Memos
    • List of Policy Memos
    • Submissions
  • Podcast
  • Online Academy
  • Events
    • Past Events
  • Recommended
  • Ukraine Experts
Contacts

Address
1957 E St NW,
Washington, DC 20052

adminponars@gwu.edu
202.994.5915

NEWSLETTER
Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
Podcast
PONARS Eurasia
PONARS Eurasia
  • About
    • Contact
    • List of Members
    • Ukraine Experts
    • About Membership
    • Executive Committee
  • Policy Memos
    • List of Policy Memos
    • Submissions
  • Podcast
  • Online Academy
  • Events
    • Past Events
  • Recommended
  • Ukraine Experts
DIGITAL RESOURCES
digital resources

Bookstore 📚

Knowledge Hub

Course Syllabi

Point & Counterpoint

Policy Perspectives

RECOMMENDED
  • Illiberalism and Public Opinion Junctures in Russia’s War on Ukraine

    View
  • Policy Exchange Discussion & Memos: Guaranteeing Ukraine’s Long-Run Security (June 9)

    View
  • Ukraine’s Best Chance for Peace

    View
  • We want the war to end. But should calls for negotiating with Putin be taken seriously?

    View
  • Policy Briefs | BEAR Network-PONARS Eurasia Conference

    View
RSS PONARS Eurasia Podcast
  • The Putin-Xi Summit: What's New In Their Joint Communique ? February 23, 2022
    In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman speaks with Russian China experts Vita Spivak and Alexander Gabuev about the February meeting between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and what it may tell us about where the Russian-Chinese relationship is headed.
  • Exploring the Russian Courts' Ruling to Liquidate the Memorial Society January 28, 2022
    In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with scholars Kelly Smith and Benjamin Nathans about the history, achievements, and impending shutdown of the Memorial Society, Russia's oldest and most venerable civic organization, and what its imminent liquidation portends for the Russian civil society.
  • Russia's 2021 census and the Kremlin's nationalities policy [Lipman Series 2021] December 9, 2021
    In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with social scientist Andrey Shcherbak about the quality of the data collected in the recent population census and the goals of Vladimir Putin's government's nationalities policy
  • Active citizens of any kind are under threat [Lipman Series 2021] November 5, 2021
    In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Alexander Verkhovsky about the Kremlin's ever expanding toolkit against political and civic activists, journalists, and other dissidents.
  • Russia's Legislative Elections followup [Lipman Series 2021] October 4, 2021
    In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Tanya Lokot and Nikolay Petrov about the results of Russia’s legislative elections and about what comes next.
  • Why Is the Kremlin Nervous? [Lipman Series 2021] September 14, 2021
    In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Ben Noble and Nikolay Petrov about Russia’s September 17-19 legislative elections, repressive measures against electoral challengers, and whether to expect anything other than preordained results.
  • Vaccine Hesitancy in Russia, France, and the United States [Lipman Series 2021] August 31, 2021
    In this week's PONARS Eurasia Podcast episode, Maria Lipman chats with Denis Volkov, Naira Davlashyan, and Peter Slevin about why COVID-19 vaccination rates are still so low across the globe, comparing vaccine hesitant constituencies across Russia, France, and the United States.  
  • Is Russia Becoming More Soviet? [Lipman Series 2021] July 26, 2021
      In a new PONARS Eurasia Podcast episode, Maria Lipman chats with Maxim Trudolyubov about the current tightening of the Russian political sphere, asking whether or not it’s helpful to draw comparisons to the late Soviet period.
  • The Evolution of Russia's Political Regime [Lipman Series 2021] June 21, 2021
    In this week's episode of the PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Grigory Golosov and Henry Hale about the evolution of Russia's political regime, and what to expect in the lead-up to September's Duma elections.
  • Volodymyr Zelensky: Year Two [Lipman Series 2021] May 24, 2021
    In this week's episode of the PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Sergiy Kudelia and Georgiy Kasianov about Ukrainian President Zelensky's second year in office, and how he has handled the political turbulence of the past year.
  • Commentary | Комментарии

Exclusive: Sanctions and Regime Survival

  • March 11, 2015
  • Mark Kramer

Some debates never die; they just get replayed. After the Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan in late December 1979, the United States imposed economic sanctions against the USSR. The Russian Federation since March 2014 has been subject to U.S. and EU sanctions for its annexation of Crimea and active role in the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine. The targets of the latest sanctions—political elites, business executives, and large companies and banks with close ties to Vladimir Putin—are more selective this time, but the continuation of the sanctions for nearly a year has rekindled the debate about the effectiveness of sanctions. Can sanctions compel governments to change policies? Do they encourage a “rally round the flag” effect? Can they help bring about regime change (which by now is the only way political power can genuinely change hands in Russia)?

The huge academic literature on sanctions addresses these questions in various ways, depending on what the aim of the sanctions is. Often the aim is to force a specific change of policy or behavior. In some instances, however, the coercing state has had the more ambitious objective of destabilizing and fomenting unrest in a targeted state. The idea is that if economic conditions deteriorate, the vast majority of people in the target country will blame their own government for the hardships and possibly rise up against it. The goal of regime change was at least part of the rationale for the use of economic warfare on numerous occasions during the Cold War, such as the Soviet Union’s imposition of economic sanctions against Yugoslavia in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the U.S. economic embargo against Cuba starting in 1960 (and tightened considerably in 1962), Soviet economic coercion against Albania and China in the 1960s, U.S. economic pressure on Salvador Allende’s government in Chile in the early 1970s, and the U.S economic embargo against Iran starting in 1979.

Moreover, even when the coercing state’s objectives are relatively limited and are not aimed at triggering upheavals and rebellion per se, one of the consequences of economic pressure might be an outbreak of destabilizing unrest in the target country. Indeed, some advocates of economic sanctions have argued that fears of such unrest are precisely what would spur the targeted regime to comply with the coercing state’s wishes.[1]

Despite the frequent use of economic pressure by states against other states, Western scholars and public officials have long questioned whether the tactic actually works. Much of the debate about the efficacy of economic sanctions lies outside the scope of this blog post, but some scholars have specifically focused on the question of whether economic coercion is likely to be successful in provoking political instability and undermining the ruling authorities in the target country. In particular, large-n studies show that, on average, economic sanctions do tend to facilitate regime change in targeted countries.

In a study of 136 countries from 1947 to 1999, Nikolay Marinov sought to determine whether “economic sanctions hurt the survival of government leaders in office.”[2] After comparing the longevity of leaders in countries that were targeted by sanctions with the longevity of leaders in countries that were not targeted, he concluded that sanctions do in fact “destabilize the leaders they target.”

In a major refinement of Marinov’s argument, Abel Escribà-Folch and Joseph Wright argue that rather than treating authoritarian regimes as a single class, scholars analyzing the impact of sanctions on regime survival must specify the type of authoritarian regime in the targeted state.[3] Escribà-Folch and Wright find that although economic sanctions do, on average, contribute to the destabilization and removal of personalistic dictators, sanctions do not have any appreciable effect on the longevity of single-party regimes and military juntas. The results of their analysis vary somewhat depending on how one treats hybrid regimes, but their findings are impressively robust.

A different take on this question comes in a study coauthored by William Kaempfer, Anton Lowenberg, and William Mertenis that relies on a model derived from public-choice theory.[4] The three authors claim that “damaging economic sanctions can have the counterproductive effect of encouraging the ruling regime and its supporters while at the same time undermining the political influence of the opposition.” As they see it, sanctions are less important for “their economic effects” than for “their impact on the relative political effectiveness of interest groups within the target country.”

Using a model of an authoritarian system in which a support-maximizing dictator engages in domestic redistribution by responding to pressures from interest groups, Kaempfer et al. contend that authoritarian rulers normally emphasize the provision of private (excludable) goods for their supporters rather than public (non-excludable) goods for the wider population. The imposition of economic sanctions, they argue, affects the relative levels of “political resources of key groups in the target countries” and thus “can alter the alignment of domestic interests” in the targeted state. In principle, this could lead to either the removal or the consolidation of the regime:

[I]f opponents of the regime are encouraged by foreign sanctions, the ability of opposition interest groups to mobilize collective action is increased. At the same time, the regime might be weakened by sanctions if potential supporters defect in expectation of imminent collapse of the status quo. However, the sanctions knife cuts both ways: it is equally likely that sanctions will cause the regime’s supporters to rally around the flag in defiance of foreign interference, thereby strengthening the ruling elite and reinforcing its objectionable policy. 

One of the implications of this approach is that sanctions cannot be effective in precipitating the downfall of the regime unless “there exists within the target country a reasonably well-organized opposition group whose political effectiveness potentially could be enhanced as a consequence of sanctions.” Even in this case, however, the sanctions might still have debilitating effects on the opposition.

The model developed by Kaempfer and his coauthors indicates that if the sanctions damage the economy of the targeted state “to such an extent as to impoverish the public, the domestic opposition’s ability to exert influence might be weakened. Moreover, the capacity of the regime to repress dissent might be increased if a poor populace is more readily policed.” Hence, the sanctions would allow the support-maximizing dictator to substitute loyalty for repression and consolidate his power.

The dictator would be helped even more if the sanctions enabled him “to gain some of the rents accruing from sanctions-induced changes in the terms of trade,” which could then be doled out to supporters to ensure their loyalty. The beneficial impact for the dictator would be multiplied if “groups that are close to the regime might be induced by the sanctions to increase their support in order to capture more of the sanctions rents for themselves,” which would mean that the costs borne by the dictator to preserve the loyalty of these key insider groups would diminish. The net result would be that the sanctions strengthen the dictatorship and undercut the main political opposition groups.

In the case of the Soviet regime and the sanctions imposed by the Carter administration in 1980 after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, we know for sure from declassified CPSU Politburo transcripts that Soviet leaders hated the sanctions and resented their effects. The sanctions did not, however, produce any near-term change in Soviet policy in Afghanistan.

The Reagan administration promptly lifted the measure that Soviet leaders particularly disliked, namely, the embargo on U.S. grain exports. During the 1980 election campaign, Reagan had promised voters in the Corn Belt states that he would end the grain embargo, and his administration fulfilled that promise in April 1981, just a few months after he took office.

Hence, assessing the longer-term effects of the 1980 sanctions is inherently difficult. The sanctions may have had a small deterrent effect on subsequent Soviet foreign policy decisions (e.g., during the crisis in Poland), but they did not change fundamental Soviet goals. Gorbachev's adoption of a vastly different approach to foreign policy is not directly traceable to the impact of past sanctions (though indirectly they may have played a small role).

In the case of the Russian Federation today, the U.S. and EU sanctions have not produced any discernible change in Russian policy vis-à-vis Crimea and eastern Ukraine, and Putin’s regime has given no indication that it will back down even if the sanctions are tightened. Will the sanctions help to bring about a change of regime?  With Putin’s popularity ratings at 85 percent and few if any signs of a debilitating split in the ruling elite, this goal, too seems elusive, at least for now. Although one cannot fully rule out a longer-term impact on the stability of the regime, that seems a distant prospect at best.

This comment is also available at openDemocracy here.


 

[1] See, for example, Susan Hannah Allen, “The Domestic Political Costs of Economic Sanctions,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 52, No. 6 (December 2008), pp. 916-944, esp. 916-917.

[2] Nikolay Marinov, “Do Economic Sanctions Destabilize Country Leaders?” American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 49, No. 3 (July 2005), pp. 564-576.

[3] Abel Escribà-Folch and Joseph Wright, “Dealing with Tyranny:  International Sanctions and the Survival of Authoritarian Rulers,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 2 (June 2010), pp. 334-359, which builds on David Lektzian and Mark Souva, “An Institutional Theory of Sanctions Onset and Success,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 51, No. 6 (November 2007), pp. 848-871.

[4] William Kaempfer, Anton Lowenberg, and William Mertens, “International Economic Sanctions against a Dictator,” Economics and Politics, Vol. 16, No. 1 (March 2004), pp. 29-51. See also William Kaempfer and Anton Lowenberg, “The Theory of International Economic Sanctions:  A Public Choice Approach,” American Economic Review, Vol. 78, No. 4 (December 1988), pp. 786-793.

 

 

+ posts
  • Perestroika and New Thinking: A Retrospective
  • A Weak Link in NATO? Bulgaria, Russia, and the Lure of Espionage
  • What Putin’s Exit Could Mean for Chechnya: The Pitfalls of Kadyrov’s State-within-a-State
  • U.S.-Russian Relations and the “New Cold War” Metaphor
Related Topics
  • EU
  • Kramer
  • Russia
  • U.S.-Russian Relations
  • Ukraine
Previous Article
  • In the News | Hовости

Президента вновь раскритиковали

  • March 10, 2015
  • Kornely Kakachia
View
Next Article
  • In the News | Hовости

Сталина на них нет: три уязвимых места путинской кадровой системы

  • March 11, 2015
  • Nikolay Petrov
View
You May Also Like
View
  • Commentary | Комментарии
  • Recommended | Рекомендуем
  • Territorial Conflict

Dominating Ukraine’s Sky

  • Volodymyr Dubovyk
  • March 5, 2022
View
  • Commentary | Комментарии
  • Recommended | Рекомендуем

Russian Anti-War Protests and the State’s Response

  • Lauren McCarthy
  • March 4, 2022
View
  • Commentary | Комментарии

Путин и Лукашенко

  • Konstantin Sonin
  • August 29, 2020
View
  • Commentary | Комментарии

Отравление оппозиционеров в России превратилось в регулярную практику

  • Vladimir Gelman
  • August 22, 2020
View
  • Commentary | Комментарии

Авторитарные режимы не вечны: О ситуации в Белоруссии

  • Vladimir Gelman
  • August 14, 2020
View
  • Commentary | Комментарии

В Беларуси пока что все идет по российскому сценарию

  • Olexiy Haran
  • August 12, 2020
View
  • Commentary | Комментарии

Опасная игра Лукашенко

  • Pavel Baev
  • August 11, 2020
View
  • Commentary | Комментарии

Власть справилась

  • Sergei Medvedev
  • August 10, 2020

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

PONARS Eurasia
  • About
  • Membership
  • Policy Memos
  • Recommended
  • Events
Powered by narva.io

Permissions & Citation Guidelines

Input your search keywords and press Enter.