How Do Sanctions Affect Incumbent Electoral Performance?

• DOI: 10.1177/1065912918804102
• Published date: 01 September 2019
• Date: 01 September 2019
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912918804102

Political Research Quarterly

2019, Vol. 72(3) 744 –759

© 2018 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912918804102

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Article

Introduction

Our understanding of how sanctions influence electoral

performance is limited. Previous studies present conflict-

ing theoretical arguments and mixed empirical evidence.

On one hand, democratic leaders are more likely to be

punished when their constituents suffer under sanction-

induced hardship—and autocratic leaders simply pass

along sanction-induced burdens to ordinary citizens. On

the other hand, sanctions make dictators vulnerable by

limiting resources for co-optation and mobilizing opposi-

tion groups. While existing research does provide a

deeper understanding of the influence of sanctions on

tenure in office, it does not reveal how sanctions affect

incumbent vote share. My research fills this gap in the

literature by exploring how sanctions may destabilize

regimes, especially during an election.

Focusing on elections, I theorize that sanctions tend to

hurt an incumbent’s vote share because sanction-driven

economic turmoil upsets voters’ well-being. In addition, I

argue that autocrats lose more votes from sanctions than

democratic leaders because they might have fewer good-

ies to hand out as part of the co-optation strategy.

Moreover, sanctions can create opportunities to embolden

opposition groups and mobilize the public in autocracies.

Frustrated and marginalized opposition groups in autoc-

racies gain political momentum from an exogenous

shock, such as an adverse economic sanction, and tend to

engage in electoral contests, and consequently invite

electoral threats to ruling elites.

This research examines 381 multiparty elections from

seventy-nine countries between 1972 and 2012. This

study includes both electoral authoritarian regimes and

full democracies. The findings of the paper support the

theoretical expectation that economic sanctions do not

help incumbents but rather undermine their electoral per-

formance by reducing their vote share during elections. I

also find supportive evidence for the conditional hypoth-

esis, which expects that the effect of sanctions on the

incumbent vote share is more pronounced in less demo-

cratic countries.

This research makes several contributions to both the

study of sanctions and how we think about the timing of

elections, especially in authoritarian regimes. First, con-

trary to conventional wisdom, I suggest that authoritarian

elections provide a means of holding the regime account-

able during foreign policy crises. Existing research suggests

804102PRQXXX10.1177/1065912918804102Political Research QuarterlyPark

research-article2018

1The College of New Jersey, Ewing, USA

Corresponding Author:

Brandon Beomseob Park, Department of Political Science, The

College of New Jersey, 239 Social Science Building, Ewing, NJ 08628,

USA.

Email: parkb@tcnj.edu

How Do Sanctions Affect Incumbent

Electoral Performance?

Brandon Beomseob Park1

Abstract

How do sanctions affect incumbent electoral performance during elections? Although existing literature suggests that

sanctions may shorten or prolong incumbent tenure, we are less informed about their role in incumbent electoral

fortunes. This research argues that sanctions hurt incumbents’ vote shares because citizens are more likely to hold

their elected officials accountable for sanction-induced economic hardships and political instabilities. It also argues

that the electoral punishment is pronounced in less democratic countries because sanctions, together with elections,

significantly limit dictator’s co-optation strategy and open a greater window of opportunity for once repressed

opposition groups in a repressive regime. Using 381 multiparty elections in seventy-nine countries between 1972 and

2012, this research finds that sanctions deteriorate the incumbent electoral performance, and they do so for autocratic

leaders more than the democratic leaders. This study has important implications about the potential accountability in

autocracies, the timing of sanctions imposition, the role of oppositions’ mobilization, and broadly speaking, the role of

sanctions in democratization.

Keywords

sanctions, electoral accountability, opposition groups

Park 745

that sanctions are less effective against autocratic states

because there are no credible mechanisms by which the

public can hold a leader accountable for the political and

economic hardship created by the sanctions. This literature

inadvertently implies that elections in authoritarian coun-

tries do not matter. However, I demonstrate that elections

are conduits for dissatisfaction of political and economic

turmoil created by sanctions even in countries where elec-

tions are not supposed to be meaningful. In other words,

autocrats are not insulated from economic pressure since

sanctions have similar effects on authoritarian and demo-

cratic leaders in elections.

Second, this research suggests a temporal dimension

in considering effective sanctions. Although scholars

have long explored various conditions that make sanc-

tions effective in inducing policy concession, the particu-

lar “timing” of a sanction, and how timing helps it to

achieve its intended goal such as democratization is

under-examined. The findings of this research imply that

economic sanctions work effectively when targeted lead-

ers are most vulnerable, and that elections that offer a

venue for electoral accountability make incumbents most

vulnerable. Elections are a pressure point that senders can

use to make sanctions effective.

Finally, given the fact that elections create an official

and tangible mechanism for holding incumbents account-

able, and that the timing of democratic transitions is

almost always linked to elections (Donno 2013), this

research suggests implications for the role of sanctions in

democratization. While previous studies have set out

vague expectations for whether sanctions assist or delay

democratization, this research helps clarify how sanc-

tions may weaken an incumbent’s political foothold dur-

ing an election, which can ultimately create a good

ground for power alternations. Moreover, this research

sheds light on the importance of opposition group coali-

tions in creating a “liberalizing electoral outcome”

(Howard and Roessler 2006) in multiparty authoritarian

regimes. Such liberalization can be rapid and dramatic if

repressed opposition groups find new electoral prospects,

stimulated by foreign sanctions.

Political Elites under Sanctions

Current research indicates that sanctions have different

effects on political elites across regime types (Allen 2008;

Cox and Drury 2006; Escribà-Folch and Wright 2010;

Major 2012; Marinov 2005). Bueno de Mesquita and his

colleague (2010) explain this observation in their selec-

torate theory. In democratic states, the size of the winning

coalition—the group of individuals needed to maintain

the current regime—is large. Democratic leaders are,

therefore, incentivized to provide public goods rather

than private goods to those who support them. Other

scholars taking a public choice perspective have claimed

that democratic leaders are more vulnerable to sanctions

because the more citizens that feel the pain of sanctions,

the more democratic elites face public pressure (Major

2012; McGillivray and Smith 2000).

In autocratic states, where the size of the winning

coalition is relatively small, the political elites are not

concerned about “average citizens,” but instead worry

about opposition from within their own coalitions (Wood

2008, 509). Due to lack of public constraints, autocratic

leaders pass along the sanction-induced burdens to ordi-

nary citizens without being held accountable. Marinov

(2005) provides an empirical demonstration for this argu-

ment, showing that democratic leaders, constrained by

their constituents, are far more likely to be removed than

dictators, who are significantly freer from the public

constraints.

Other research, however, posits that sanctions also

may threaten a dictators’ tenure. For example, Major

(2012) finds that dictators are vulnerable to sanctions if

domestic instability, in response to sanctions, such as

public demonstrations or riots, break out. Major argues

that although mobilization of counter-elites is rare during

normal time in autocracies, sanction-induced domestic

political instability creates an opportunity for opposition

groups to mobilize and eventually threaten an

incumbent.

This argument was further extended by von Soest and

Wahman (2015), who suggest that the destabilization

effect of sanctions on autocratic leaders is based on the

way that sanction-induced economic stress limits dicta-

tors’ co-optation strategy, traditionally an efficient sur-

vival tactic. Their finding shows that sanctions, if they

explicitly aim to promote democratic changes, tend to

increase the probabilities of irregular changes in authori-

tarian political elites by destabilizing the targeted authori-

tarian leaders.

Given the conflicting theoretical and empirical find-

ings in the literature, complexity exists in our current

understanding of the effect of sanctions on incumbents.

One of the sources of this complexity is that existing

research fails to acknowledge that a number of autocratic

states also hold elections and fails to consider the effects

of sanctions during these elections. Put differently, exist-

ing research unwittingly suggests that these elections are

an irrelevant feature of this group of autocratic regimes.

This oversight misses the bigger picture. In fact, there

is ample evidence to suggest that elections in authoritar-

ian states are not unimportant. Howard and Roessler

(2006) argue that the strategic decisions of opposition

groups during elections in authoritarian states signifi-

cantly affect not only the electoral process but also the

election outcomes. Elections in authoritarian states are

also important because they provide a platform for