Reputations in economic coercion: explaining the effectiveness of sanction threats

Economic sanctions are an increasingly common phenomenon in international politics. A large and growing body of research has been devoted to their study and to the questions of whether and how sanctions work. Yet while our understanding of imposed sanctions and their ability to bring about desired outcomes has increased significantly over, we know much less about the earlier stages of the sanctioning process. Why do targeted states sometimes give in to mere threats of sanctions but reject them at other times? Is it enough that the prospective costs of threatened sanctions are large? Or will a state stand firm even in the face of potentially powerful sanctions if there is reason to believe that the sender is bluffing? Taking as a point of departure the general insight that coercive threats have to be both credible and potent to succeed, this dissertation proposes a novel explanation for sanctions outcomes. I argue that a state's past record of carrying out sanction threats against recalcitrant opponents provides targeted states with information about the likelihood with which a current threat will be enforced. Based on observations of their previous actions, sender states acquire reputations for resolve, which come to affect the perceived credibility and thus the coercive effectiveness of their threats. From this basic argument, I derive three hypotheses, which I test against a number of alternative predictors suggested by the extant literature. The findings indicate that potential sanctioners might do well to mind their reputations

The Domestic Politics of Trade and Conflict

Liberal international relations theory suggests that mutual gains from trade prevent conflict between states. Previous research has focused predominately on international outcomes, especially the occurrence of militarized conflict between pairs of states. How concerns about welfare gains from trade help produce the policy choices leading to these outcomes is less well understood. This paper examines the influence of economic interests arising from international trade on the policy-making process at the domestic level. If the benefits of trade increase the opportunity cost of conflict, then support for a harmonious foreign policy should be strongest among trade's domestic beneficiaries. Those whose income is diminished by trade have no reason to favor a friendly foreign policy and might even prefer a hostile alternative. We test whether the domestic distributional effects of trade affect support for hostile foreign policies toward China among representatives in the US Congress. An analysis of cosponsorship and roll-call voting suggests that the export orientation and import sensitivity of their districts influences members’ positions on measures that criticize Chinese policies or treat the country as a security threat

Trade and Foreign Policy Attitudes

Does trade influence whether individuals view other states as friendly or threatening? Liberal theory implies that it should, but the individual-level implications of the liberal argument are rarely tested. Trade should influence individual attitudes more strongly where trade is more economically important. International trade also creates both winners and losers within the trading states, and the foreign policy attitudes of these winners and losers should differ. The authors test hypotheses drawn from this line of argument using a forty-seven-country survey conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes project. They find some evidence that exports but not imports reduce hostile foreign policy attitudes. They find little support for the claim that the trade interests indicated by factor ownership influence attitudes toward trading partners in this broad cross-national sample. On the other hand, attitudes toward trade and foreign direct investment are correlated with broader foreign policy attitudes in the way liberal theory suggests. The authors conclude that there is reason to believe that trade influences individual foreign policy attitudes but that factor ownership does not provide an adequate account of individual interests in international trade in most cases.trade and conflict; public opinion; liberalism

Reliability, Reputation, and Alliance Formation

In this paper, we examine how the past alliance behavior of nations affects the likelihood that these states will be involved in alliance formation. We contend that nations evaluate the reputations of potential allies when searching for alliance partners. Reputation information is processed by governments along with other immediate concerns. By introducing a model and developing subsequent measures of reputational alliance histories, we improve upon our current understanding of the factors that drive alliance formation. Using alliance reputation data derived from the ATOP project (1816–2000), we find support for the hypothesis that a reputation for upholding one's agreements significantly improves the likelihood of membership in future alliances