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Hazards or Hassles The Effect of Sanctions on Leader Survival*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2015

Amanda A. Licht
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Abstract

Recent empirical work scrutinizes the ability of economic sanctions to destabilize targeted leaders. Limitations in data and modeling choices, however, may have inflated estimates of sanctions’ efficacy. I propose a unified theoretical model, incorporating the possibility that leaders targeted with threats and imposed sanctions differ in baseline risks from those who are not. I combine this hazards approach with an empirical strategy to account for differences in ex ante risks and improved data on leader failure. This approach uncovers a considerably more modest effect. Sanctions rarely destabilize their targets.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , January 2017 , pp. 143 - 161
Copyright
© The European Political Science Association 2015 

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Footnotes

*

Amanda A. Licht, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Binghamton University, PO Box 6000 (aalicht@gmail.com). The author’s sincere thanks to many people who read or provided comments as this paper developed from a dissertation chapter to a conference paper to a stand alone article, especially Brian Lai, Sara Mitchell, Fred Boehmke, Jong Hee Park, Alex Quiroz Flores, Mike Ward, Susan Allen, Ben Fordham, Katja Kleinberg, and Dave Clark. The author also thanks Cameron Thies and the anonymous reviewers. Any remaining errors, of course, are my own. To view supplementary material for this article, please visit http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2015.25

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Supplementary material: Link

Licht Dataset

Dataset

http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/PVMZB1
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Licht supplementary material

Hazards or Hassles RnR Appendix

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Data bibliography

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