The Determinants of Economic Sanctions Success and Failure

With an inconclusive track record, questions about the future utility of sanctions continue to plague policy makers and scholars. Drawing on previous episodes, both successful and failed sanctions tell us a great deal about economic coercion, but the causes of failure have been largely understudied. In order to further understanding of the coercive influence of sanctions, the analysis presented here delineates between the determinants of failure and success. To this end, a competing risks event history model is employed to test the impact that domestic politics have on sanctions success as well as sanctions failure, with strong results suggesting that political structures do affect the way states respond to economic coercion.