Re-examining the effects of Western sanctions on democracy and human rights in the 21st century

Whether and how severely imposed economic sanctions affect ordinary citizens in targeted countries is a central question of International Relations (IR) research on sanctions. Although frequently intended to bring about improvements to democracy and human rights, their record of doing so has historically been mixed at best. However, many of the canonical quantitative studies on this critical issue only cover the 1980s and 1990s. Since then, sanctions practice has undergone major innovations in design and implementation following debates on unintended consequences and humanitarian harm. Given these significant changes towards 'targeted' or 'smart' sanctions, it stands to reason that sanctions may today be achieving their intended purposes. Furthermore, more current and precise data on sanctions, human rights, and democracy has since been published and new methods for causal inference using observational data have been developed. I take up these policy-related and methodological innovations to re-examine the effects of Western sanctions explicitly intended to improve democracy and human rights. I study this type of sanctions in the 1990–2021 timeframe by applying matching and weighting to account for the strategic selection process of sanctions imposition. This builds on work examining coups and fraudulent elections as key ‘trigger events.’ I then estimate the effects of such sanctions on human rights and democracy using difference-in-differences analysis. The results suggest that the negative effects of sanctions on human rights and democracy persist in the 21st century. This provides an important update to the empirical literature on the subject. As sanctions continue to grow in popularity and usage, policymakers must continue devoting attention to minimizing the civilian harm they often cause. Beyond these substantive contribution, this paper presents a template for replicating and extending country-year research in IR in general.