Abstract Economic sanctions appear to be an inexpensive means for wealthy countries to punish or coerce targets. Not all sanctions are, or will be, cheap, however. I demonstrate how contingent valuation techniques provide better estimates of the relationship between sanctions cost and public support for sanctions. I present results from a high-quality 2026 survey to demonstrate public support for successful sanctions on Russia and from a 2022 survey experiment that measured the importance of sanctions’ success for bearing sanctions costs. Overall, the prospects of success substantially increased respondents’ willingness to pay, but support declined substantially as the anticipated costs increased. Textual analysis of open-ended responses from the 2022 experiment establishes that normative arguments become less frequently invoked as the cost of sanctions rose. A third experiment shows that, in a crisis over Taiwan, American respondents were not willing to bear economic burdens of any sort to impose sanctions on China.
Paul Musgrave (Tue,) studied this question.