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The European Union, the United Nations, and the United States frequently use economic sanctions. This article introduces the EUSANCT Dataset—which amends, merges, and updates some of the most widely used sanctions databases—to trace the evolution of sanctions after the Cold War. The dataset contains case-level and dyadic information on 326 threatened and imposed sanctions by the EU, the UN, and the US. We show that the usage and overall success of sanctions have not grown from 1989 to 2015 and that while the US is the most active sanctioner, the EU and the UN appear more successful.

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dc.contributor.author: Weber, Patrick M.; Stępień, Beata

Both foreign aid and sanctions are foreign policy tools to promote democracy. Yet, it is unclear how far incentives and coercion enhance democratization. Since sanctions and aid are often employed at the same time, the goal of this study is to determine their joint effect on democratization in target/recipient countries. We argue that sending democracy aid through civil society organizations enhances the effectiveness of sanctions as a democracy promotion tool because the civil society is empowered to introduce democratic changes. Thus, in addition to the top-down pressure on the target government created by sanctions, there is a bottom-up pressure exerted by the civil society. Our empirical results show that democratic sanctions by the European Union and the United States are more likely to have a positive effect when aid flows bypass the government. Conversely, aid channeled through the public sector mitigates the generally positive effect of sanctions on democracy. In order to estimate these joint effects, we employ a new comprehensive dataset on economic sanctions: the EUSANCT Dataset which integrates and updates existing databases on sanctions for the period between 1989 and 2015, merged with disaggregated OECD aid data and V-Dem democracy scores.

One of the core disputes in the literature on economic statecraft addresses the conditions under which multilateral sanctions are more successful than unilateral ones. Our game-theoretic model implies that extant assessments do not sufficiently differentiate between the varying abilities of multilateral and unilateral senders in credibly threatening and carrying out sanctions. We introduce a selection argument that focuses on the complex decision-making process of the European Union (EU) to impose sanctions. In comparison to the United States (US), the institutional structure of the EU and conflicting economic interests of multiple principals make the imposition of sanctions much more difficult. In addition, the international organization is less accountable vis-à-vis the voters. Both mechanisms render sanction threats by the EU less credible. Since the United States as a unilateral sender can issue more credible sanction threats, imposed US sanctions are a negative selection of cases and thus less successful than restrictive measures imposed by the EU. We test these propositions with a new dataset on threatened and imposed sanctions by the European Union and the United States for the period between 1989 and 2015. The empirical evidence demonstrates that EU sanctions are indeed more successful than those by the US. In contrast, US sanction threats are more successful than those by the EU. We provide evidence for the difficulties of multilateral senders to impose sanctions by showing that EU sanctions are both less likely and less severe, the more varied the economic links of the multilateral sender with the sanctioned state are.

This article analyzes the sanction threats and impositions by the EU, the UN, and the US in the period between 1989 and 2015, demonstrating that the popular perception of economic coercion is largely mistaken. We show against the backdrop of high-profile failures that the sanction threats and impositions of the United States and the two International Governmental Organizations (IGOs) were often striving to achieve the dominant goal of protecting key liberal values such as the protection of free elections and human rights, but that the design of the coercive measures was frequently flawed.