Timing Is Everything: Economic Sanctions, Regime Type, and Domestic Instability

Recent scholarship suggests that democracies are more vulnerable to economic coercion than authoritarian regimes; unfortunately, the countries most often targeted by economic sanctions are nondemocratic. While agreeing that authoritarians are indeed more robust to sanctions at most times, this article argues that there exist “windows of opportunity,” created by domestic instability, which make dictatorships particularly vulnerable to sanctions pressures. This is because, while domestic discontent in democracies is often seen a form of politics as usual (even if intensified), public demonstrations against the government in an authoritarian country can be both cause and indication of deep structural problems and crises that may be exploited by sanctioning countries. The hypothesis that the interaction between regime-type and domestic instability leads to greater vulnerability among despots finds strong support in a number of selection-corrected regressions indicating that, when sanctioning authoritarians, timing is indeed everything.