Do elections matter for sanction effectiveness? Scholars have long highlighted the importance of domestic political factors in target (i.e. sanctioned) states in explaining when economic sanctions work. This line of research, however, has primarily focused on political regime characteristics and interest groups that are relatively low time-variant during sanction episodes. Building on this literature, we explore the effect of temporal proximity to elections. While the impact of elections have been examined in the context of military conflicts, their possible effects on sanction effectiveness have not been subject to systematic scrutiny. We argue that target governments are more likely to comply with sender demands as elections loom near in order to avoid the likely political costs of sanctions. The effect of elections, however, is likely to vary across different election characteristics and political regime types. We assess the empirical merits of our claims using data on over 1,000 sanction cases between 1950 and 2020. The results from a battery of empirical tests, including those that account for potential selection bias, support our hypotheses. We find that elections have a positive effect on sanction success, and this effect is more prominent in less democratic states that hold competitive elections. This suggests that even if sanctions have a relatively low success rate against non-democratic polities, elections may provide a window of opportunity for senders to extract concessions from target states.

中文翻译：

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选举临近和经济制裁的有效性


选举对制裁有效性重要吗？长期以来，学者们一直强调目标（即受制裁）国家国内政治因素在解释经济制裁何时发挥作用时的重要性。然而，这方面的研究主要集中在制裁期间随时间变化相对较小的政治政权特征和利益集团。在这些文献的基础上，我们探讨了选举时间邻近性的影响。虽然在军事冲突的背景下审查了选举的影响，但其对制裁有效性可能产生的影响尚未受到系统性审查。我们认为，随着选举临近，目标政府更有可能遵守发送者的要求，以避免制裁可能带来的政治成本。然而，选举的效果可能因不同的选举特征和政治政权类型而异。我们使用 1950 年至 2020 年间 1,000 多个制裁案例的数据来评估我们主张的实证价值。一系列实证检验的结果（包括那些考虑潜在选择偏差的检验）支持了我们的假设。我们发现，选举对制裁成功具有积极影响，这种影响在举行竞争性选举的民主程度较低的国家更为突出。这表明，即使制裁针对非民主政体的成功率相对较低，选举也可能为制裁者提供一个获得目标国家让步的机会之窗。