cates that “the sender country clearly failed to achieve its goals or may even have left
the sender country worse o¤ than before the measures were imposed (pp.42)”. Since
most studies using Hufbauer, Schott, and Elliott (HSE)’s data generate even less op-
timistic results than HSE’s, it is reasonable to conclude that economic sanctions are
not as e¤ective as policy-makers usually think.
Total
Complete
Sanctions Objectives
Cases
Failures
Failures
Modest Policy Changes
51
34
10
Destabilization of Leader
21
10
4
Disruption of Military Adventure
18
12
8
Impairment of Military Potential
10
8
4
Other Major Policy Changes
20
15
4
Total
120
79
30
Table 1 E¤ectiveness of Economic Sanctions until 1990
(Source: Hufbauer et al. 1990)
Previous studies have enhanced our understanding of sanctions in many ways.
Recent empirical studies of sanctions, in particular, display two avenues of progress.
First, they begin to take selection problems seriously and …nd some evidence of these
problems (Nooruddin 2002, Drezner 2003, Marinov 2005). While the selection stage
of these works deals with the sanctions’imposition, formal scholars suggest looking at
the other selection stage of threat (Niou and Lacy 2004), which is more challenging to
test. Second, given deep disagreement on sanctions’e¤ectiveness, recent work centers
on the determinants of sanctions’duration rather than sanctions’success (Bolks and
Al-Sowayel 2000, Dorussen and Mo 2001, Drury 2001, McGillivray and Stam 2004).
2
However, the initial puzzle still remains poorly understood. Why do policymakers
so frequently impose sanctions, when scholars entertain such strong doubts about their
success? Are sanctions just a symbolic way of showing threats irrespective of their
outcomes or are there di¤erent explanations of the predominantly failed outcomes?
More generally, what explains the outcomes of economic sanctions?
I answer these questions using the following steps. First, I present the plausible
explanations of the sanctions’outcomes such as issue salience, alliance, domestic insti-
tutions, and economic dependence (section 2). Then, I construct an empirical model
2
One interesting …nding that presents a di¤erent way of looking at the e¤ectiveness of sanctions is
that the presence of sanctions reduces the target leader’s tenure (Marinov 2005).
2
Convention