Dictators’ Behavior Under Conditions of Economic Sanctions Cumulative Effect

NRU Higher School of Economics , 2017. No. WP BRP 50/PS/2017.

Чмель К. Ш., Демин А. В., Казанцев К. И.

Economic sanctions, like the most of political events involving numerous states, are almost always explicitly aimed to alter internal policies and affect domestic issues. Sanctions are not a discrete event, rather they are a long lasting insidious process. It is significant to consider not only the state of the country under sanctions or without them, but also the effect of the time under sanctions. Hence, the research question is as follows: How does cumulative effect of sanctions influence the dictators behavior in terms of repressions and co-optation? In order to find a feasible answer to that question, first, we build a theoretical model and draw empirical implications from it. The main argument that we develop in the paper is as follows. The overall effect of sanction is robustly important for the dictator, fostering repressions and co-optation (separately treated) as the ways of buttressing the regime legitimacy. Moreover, cumulative effect of sanctions (i.e. the influence of all the previous periods under sanctions) increases the levels of repressions with decreasing marginal effects.

Keywords: game theory, санкции, репрессии, авторитарные режимы, authoritarian regimes, кооптация, sanctions, dictators strategies, repressions, co-optation, стратегии диктатора, формальное моделирование