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AbstractFor years, the United States has imposed economic sanctions to compel countries to alter their behavior. An important concern is whether government sanctions influence private foreign direct investment (FDI) decisions, the largest source of foreign capital. In the first study to assess empirically the relationship between economic sanctions and FDI, we consider whether U.S. sanctions influence U.S. FDI inflows into targeted countries. Using panel data for 171 countries from 1965 to 2000, we find strong evidence that U.S investors pull out of countries targeted for U.S sanctions prior to their imposition. This disinvestment is not permanent and investment tends to return after the sanctions are imposed. The results provide support for FDI studies that show the effect of risk on investor decision making.

Multiple theories posit the existence of a dyadic democratic peace. The authors extend the logic of three theories of the democratic peace — informational, normative, and preferences — and find that they make different predictions with respect to the onset and escalation of disputes across the range of similar regime dyads. First, regarding dispute onset, the preferences argument, but not the normative and informational arguments, expects autocratic dyads of similar type to have less conflict onset than mixed dyads. Second, the normative argument expects democratic, but not non-democratic, dyads to be less likely to escalate their disputes, while the informational argument expects democracy to have little impact, after conflict onset has been taken into account. The preferences argument expects all dyads of similar regime type to be less likely to escalate their disputes. Critical tests of these expectations are conducted by estimating a censored choice model of conflict onset and escalation, using multiple measures of interstate conflict. The authors find little support for a broader regime-similarity peace, and their findings on democratic dispute escalation favor the informational argument over the normative argument.

Why do economic sanctions sometimes succeed, but often fail, to produce a policy change? The authors argue that the effect of economic punishment is conditional on a state's political institutions. In all cases, the key to sanctions success is to generate political costs for the target regime's winning coalition. However, because of different institutional incentives, economically punishing sanctions are less likely to succeed against a nondemocratic target than against a democratic target. Sanctions increase rents. This benefits nondemocratic leaders more than democratic ones. Also, nondemocratic leaders have smaller winning coalitions, so their core constituents suffer less from sanctions than democratic leaders. Additionally, the authors' strategic argument leads to novel hypotheses regarding the initiation of sanctions. They test hypotheses from their political cost argument against all dyadic sanctions cases between 1948 and 1990, using two different dependent variables and a censored selection estimator to take into account the strategic nature of sanctioning.

This article argues that the influence of democratic institutions in international relations extends beyond the military realm and into the economic. The authors extend Bueno de Mesquita et al.'s institutional theoryof political regimes to explain the use and variety of economic sanctions in world politics. It is argued that democracies impose sanctions more oftenthan other regime types because they encompass a greater variety of interest groups. Yet, institutional incentives for successful foreign policies lead democracies to prefer sanctioning non-democracies instead of democracies.The pacifying influence of jointly democratic regimes, then, extends into the economic realm. Further, these same institutional incentives account forvariation across regime types in the choice of sanctions used and the goalspursued. Owing to incentives to minimize harm to their public and achieve successful foreign policies, democratic regimes are more likely than non-democracies to impose financial sanctions and pursue minor foreign policy goals. The authors use the Hufbauer, Schott & Elliott sanctions dataset to empirically evaluate each hypothesis. The empirical analysis supports the argument that domestic political institutions affect the incentives of leaders and, therefore, the foreign policies of states.

This paper addresses a new issue in sanctions research: the determinants of the time it takes for nations to return to presanctions levels of trade after a sanctions episode ends. The authors argue that democratic institutions reduce transaction costs and promote trust between economic agents. Their primary hypothesis is that jointly democratic dyads return to their presanctions level of trade faster than nonjointly democratic dyads. To evaluate this argument, the authors have constructed an event history data set of 59 sanctions cases beginning between 1954 and 1992. The empirical analysis finds strong support for the theoretical hypothesis that democratic political institutions facilitate a return to trade. These results hold even in the presence of competing explanations, and are robust to alternative model specifications.

Sanctions are designed to reduce the amount of resources available to the targeted actor and have the potential to be an effective tool for bringing disputing sides in a civil conflict to the bargaining table by altering incentives for continued fighting. Thus, there is reason to believe that sanctions can shorten the duration of civil conflicts. However, once sides in a conflict have moved to the use of violence to settle their dispute, it is hard for sanctions, in isolation, to impose enough cost to convince warring factions that settling a conflict has greater value than what could be expected from continued fighting. In this article, we argue that sanctions, in isolation, are unlikely to affect the duration of civil conflicts. However, when sanctions are combined with military interventions they can contribute to conflict management strategies resulting in shorter civil conflicts. We test our expectations empirically using data on civil conflicts from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program Armed Conflict Database and data on economic sanctions from the Threat and Imposition of Economic Sanctions Database. Our results suggest that the best hope for sanctions to shorten the duration of civil conflicts is if they are used as part of a comprehensive international response that includes institutional sanctions and military interventions.