Crimea come what may: Do economic sanctions backfire politically?
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
| Author | Mikhail A Alexseev,Henry E Hale |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343319866879 |
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Research Articles |
Crimea come what may: Do economic
sanctions backfire politically?
Mikhail A Alexseev
Department of Political Science, San Diego State University
Henry E Hale
Department of Political Science, George Washington University
Abstract
Do international economic sanctions backfire politically, resulting in increased rather than decreased domestic
support for targeted state leaders? Backfire arguments are common, but researchers have only recently begun
systematically studying sanctions’ impact on target-state public opinion, not yet fully unpacking different possible
backfire mechanisms. We formulate backfire logic explicitly, distinguishing between ‘scapegoating’ and ‘rallying’
mechanisms and considering the special case of ‘smart sanctions’ aimed at crony elites rather than the masses. We test
five resulting hypotheses using an experimental design and pooled survey data spanning the imposition of sanctions
in one of the most substantively important cases where the backfire argument has been prominent: Western
sanctions on Russia in 2014. We find no evidence of broad sanctions backfire. Instead, sanctions have forced Russia’s
president to pay a political price. But this price has been low compared to the massive political benefits we document
arising from the sanctions-triggering event, the Crimea annexation. Moreover, hidden by aggregate figures are signs
of a ‘backlash of the better-off’ by which ‘smart’ sanctions turn economic well-being from a predictor of opposition
into a predictor of regime support.
Keywords
authoritarianism, experimental research, political economy, rallying, Russia, sanctions, Ukraine
When powerful global actors like the United States and
European Union impose international economic sanc-
tions – ‘actions that one or more countries take to limit
or end their economic relations with a target country in
an effort to persuade that country to change one or more
of its policies’ (Morgan, Bapat & Kobayashi, 2013: 1) –
critics have long warned that sanctions can backfire in at
least one of two interrelated ways: (1) by rallying domes-
tic public support for the target state leadership; and (2)
by allowing that leadership to shift the blame for eco-
nomic problems onto international aggression (Knorr,
1975; Galtung, 1967; Pape, 1997, 1998; Nooruddin,
2002). If this happens, target-state leaders might con-
tinue rather than give up the behavior that triggered the
sanctions. For example, Charap & Sucher (2015: 6)
argue that the economic sanctions imposed by the
United States and the EU on Russia for annexing
Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and stoking up the Don-
bas war in 2014 gave ‘Mr Putin a powerful political
instrument to deflect blame for the consequences of his
own baleful decisions in Ukraine’ and thus to obtain ‘all-
time-high approval ratings’ and ‘the near-complete
marginalization of dissenting voices’.
Do international economic sanctions actually gener-
ate the backfire effects that are often attributed to them?
This question is important, as a positive answer could
lead policymakers to reject such sanctions as counter-
productive. Yet it is also a complex question requiring
a systematic analysis of domestic public opinion in target
states at the individual level, which until very recently
Corresponding authors:
alexseev@sdsu.edu, hhale@gwu.edu
Journal of Peace Research
2020, Vol. 57(2) 344–359
ªThe Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0022343319866879
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has been a missing dimension in sanctions research. Sev-
eral studies have begun addressing this knowledge gap
(Grossman, Manekin & Margalit, 2018; Seitz, Presbi-
tero & Zazzalo, 2017). Using mass survey data and
experiments, they find sizeable backfire effects in differ-
ent societies through rallying or economic blame-shifting
(or both) even when sanctions narrowly target the elites.
Yet, this line of research (Frye, 2019 in particular) also
raises two fundamental problems, which are as important
theoretically and substantively as they are challen ging
methodologically. First, when a sanctioned leader
remains not only in power but highly popular at home,
it can be very hard to distinguish whether a leader’s
enduring reign and popularity occur because of or
despite sanctions. In other words, such a leader might
be benefiting from sanctions backfire, but it is also usu-
ally possible that the sanctions are working against the
leader yet are overpowered by enduring rally-around-the-
flag effects from the leader’s actions that triggered sanc-
tions in the first place (Mueller, 1973; Baker & Oneal,
2001). Second, when sanctions narrowly target eco-
nomic and political elites within an authoritarian state,
the effects on support for target-state leaders may differ
across segments of the population depending on their
relationship to these elites.
Our study explicitly formulates a theory of sanctions
backfire, breaking it down into the two essential compo-
nents identified in the literature – nationalist rallying and
blame-shifting – and presenting testable hypotheses that,
inter alia, address the two challenges outlined above. It
then employs an experimental design and survey data
spanning the imposition of sanctions to test these
hypotheses on a substantively important case where the
backfire argument has been prominent: international
economic sanctions imposed on Russia after it annexed
Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and fomented an insur-
gency in eastern Ukraine in 2014. We find little evidence
of sanctions backfire as it is usually argued. On aggregate,
the positive rallying effect of the sanctions-triggering
event (the annexation of Crimea) is overpowering a
much weaker (but still evident) negative effect of the
sanctions themselves on Russian President Vladimir
Putin’s popularity. We do, however, uncover a specific
form of sanctions backfire that is hidden when one looks
at aggregate public opinion: a ‘backlash of the better-off’
that likely results from the Russia sanctions being tar-
geted primarily at Putin cronies who control much of the
economy. Of course, weakening a misbehaving leader-
ship may not be a primary goal of sanctions, so these
findings would need to be weighed together with other
considerations to reach a judgement on sanctions’ overall
effectiveness.
Existing research on sanctions backfire
Whereas rigorous empirical analysis of public opinion in
sanctioned states is a recent development, its importance
to the mainstream sanctions literature is clear. The study
of sanctions has focused primarily on determining what
makes them most likely to ‘succeed’ or be ‘effective’
(Allen & Lektzian, 2013; Baldwin, 1985; Bapat et al.,
2013; Bonetti, 1998; Dizaji & van Bergeijk, 2013;
McLean & Whang, 2014; Hufbauer, Schott, Elliott &
Oegg [subsequently HSEO], 2007; Lindsay, 1986; Mor-
gan et al., 2013; Rudolf, 2007; Soest & Wahman, 2013;
Whang, 2010). Regardless of divergent views on what
precisely these terms mean,
1
researchers at least impli-
citly tend to concur that sanctions are more likely to
succeed if they are able to impose significant perceived
or actual costs on sanctioned states’ leaders (Escriba-
Folch & Wright, 2010; Kaempfer & Lowenberg,
1988; Marinov, 2005; Lektzian & Souva, 2007). And
studies have also demonstrated that societal responses to
the sanctions in target states – ranging from public opin-
ion trends and perceptions of individual regime stake-
holders to mass protest – are usually a major factor in this
cost assessment (Dehejia & Wood, 1992; Losman,
1979). While this is not surprising when the target state
is a democracy (Nooruddin, 2002; Allen, 2005; Mari-
nov, 2005; Kono, 2008; HSEO, 2007), societal
responses are also widely documented to matter in
authoritarian regimes (Escriba-Folch & Wright, 2010;
Kaempfer, Lowenberg & Mertens, 2004; Wood, 2008).
Accordingly, across all regime types, leaders are found to
respond to sanctions by appealing to their own country’s
public opinion in efforts to counteract or reverse sanc-
tions’ intended impact (Ang & Peksen, 2007; Galtung,
1967; Pape, 1997, 1998). These accounts have been
based primarily on systematic case studies (e.g. HSEO,
2007; Pape, 1997; Baldwin, 1985), event data analysis
(e.g. Marinov, 2005; Bapat et al., 2013), formal model-
ing (e.g. Tsebelis, 1990; Whang, 2010), or media con-
tent analysis (Kazun, 2016).
Taking research to the next level, a wave of recent
survey analyses in target states (Frye, 2019; Grossman,
Manekin & Margalit, 2018; Seitz, Presbitero & Zazzalo,
2017) specifically test for the existence of backfire. These
studies reveal sanctions do not always affect public
1
See Online appendix Discussion 1.
Alexseev & Hale 345
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