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Coercive behavior is very common in international politics. Governments are constantly
threatening each other and employing various tools of statecraft in an attempt to get their targets to
change national policy, with mixed results. Some targets comply with the demands, while others resist all
pressure placed upon them. For example, it took 32 years of economic sanctions including eight years of
quite severe pressure before the South African government dismantled the apartheid system. Conversely,
after 42 years of economic pressure even more damaging than that employed against South Africa, Fidel
Castro continues to resist the U.S. demands that Cuba change political regimes.
This diverse record also applies to cases involving heavy use of military pressure. After suffering
years of sanctions over treatment of ethnic minorities and 77 days of bombing, Slobodan Milosevic and
the Serbian government were finally willing to concede to NATO demands to surrender control of
Kosovo. On the other hand, after a decade of perhaps the most devastating sanctions regime ever
established, a military build-up clearly sufficient to conquer the country, and senders who were highly
credible due to their previous actions against both Milosevic in 1999 and the Taliban in 2001, Saddam
Hussein never was willing to comply with demands that he dismantle his WMD program and allow
inspectors to verify the destruction.
Why do some governments faced with coercive pressure choose to comply with the demands
being made, while others choose to resist? That is the central question of this paper. In addition to being
an empirical puzzle, the answer to this question has direct theoretical and policy implications.
Understanding why the targets of coercion choose the response they do will serve to enhance our general
understanding of state behavior, particularly when states come into conflict with each other. We also need
to understand how targets respond to coercive pressure before we can understand why policy-makers
choose to use coercion in a given situation.
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The policy implications are also significant, since better
understanding how targets respond to coercive pressure will allow policy-makers to choose the
appropriate means of achieving their ends and tailor coercive pressure to be more effective.
In this paper, I argue that the way governments respond to coercive pressure is primarily driven
by domestic political considerations. Specifically, they are choosing to comply or resist based on the
implications of that decision for their ability to retain political power. The primary factors that affect this
are the extent to which the pressure employed by the coercer threatens the interests of the support
coalition of the government, the cost to the support coalition of replacing the government, and the impact
the policy change demanded will have upon the interests of the support coalition, primarily the interest
the support coalition has in preserving their political authority.
This paper is divided into several sections. The first section is a discussion of the logic of
coercion and the Political Accountability model of coercion compliance. After explaining this model, I
provide an overview of the other mechanisms of coercion tested for this paper. The following section
covers the research methodology, after which are two sections discussing the findings for economic and
military coercion separately. I conclude the paper with a discussion of the similarities and differences
observed for economic and military coercion, and provide a summary of the implications of this research.
The Political Accountability Model
Coercion is the deliberate and purposive use of overt threats or sanctions
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to influence the
strategic choices of a foreign government. Coercion is distinct from what Thomas C. Schelling calls
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David Baldwin (1999/2000) makes this same point with regard to economic sanctions, arguing that until we
understand how sanctions actually work we cannot understand why policy-makers choose that policy over other
options.
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Sanctions include various forms of pressure such as military, economic, and diplomatic.
Convention