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Current sanctions orthodoxy argues that groups' ability to set policy depends on their total budget. According to such a perspective, successful sanctions must target the unfriendly within the target countries while shielding "innocent bystanders" from harm. The authors argue that the focus on groups' aggregate budget constraint and the war-of-attrition view of policy formation misconceives of how policies are determined. The most effective groups to sanction will be those whose spending has the greatest marginal effect on policy. The authors show that this will often be the very innocent bystanders that prevailing theories have argued must be protected. Although this conclusion is conditional on their level of institutional empowerment and their having sufficient resources to make an impact on policy if properly motivated, when these initial conditions are met, a sanctions design can be specified with a high degree of prospective utility for sender states.
Keywords: economic sanctions: public choice; interest group politics; interest group lobbying
The past several decades have borne witness to a substantial increase in the use of economic sanctions to achieve a growing number of policy goals. One study, for example, has noted that, from the 1940s through the end of the cold war, the number of sanctions events initiated increased nearly fourfold (Hufbauer, Schott, and Elliot 1990). Despite considerable evidence pointing to sanctions' relative lack of success in the past (Chency 1999; Pape 1997), there is a growing consensus that the use of sanctions will likely continue to increase for the foreseeable future (Cortright and Lopez 2000; Rogers 1996; Stremlau 1996). It is of little surprise, then, that this growing interest in the use of the sanctions instrument has seen a parallel growth in the number of analyses of economic coercion produced by the academic community.
Although the contributions to the sanctions literature have been quite diverse, most studies have been concerned with seeking to determine those factors most responsible for making economic coercion more effective or, indeed, seeking to determine if sanctions work at all (see, e.g., Pape 1997; Dashti-Gibson, Davis, and Radcliff 1997; Hufbauer, Schott, and Elliot 1990). The principal candidate variables for explaining sanctions' success or failure, such as whether sanctions are imposed multilaterally or the degree to which the sanctions affected the target's economy, have...