Sanctions and public opinion: The case of the Russia-Ukraine gas disputes
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Sanctions and public opinion: The case of the Russia-Ukraine gas disputes William Seitz 1,2,3 & Alberto Zazzaro 2 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract Economic sanctions usually fail, sometimes even provoking the opposite of the intended outcome. Why are sanctions so often ineffective? One prominent view is that sanctions generate popular support for the targeted government and its policies; an outcome referred to as the rally-around-the-flag effect. We quantify this effect in the context of a major trade dispute between Ukraine and the Russian Federation, which led to a cut in gas exports to Ukraine and a sharp increase of gas prices. Using individual data on political and economic preferences before and after the trade dispute and exploiting the cross section heterogeneity in the individual exposure to the price shock—measured by the connection to a centralized gas/heating system—we find that people more directly affected by the increase of gas prices were significantly more likely to change their opinions in support of Western-style political and economic systems preferred by the incumbent government, consistent with a rally-around-the-flag effect. Keywords Sanctions . Gas dispute . Russia . Ukraine . Rally-around-the-flag JEL classification F13 . F51
Sanctions are a sign of irritation; they are not the instrument of serious policies. - Sergey Lavrov, Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-01909360-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
* William Seitz [email protected]
1
CSEF, Naples, Italy
2
University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy
3
MoFiR, Ancona, Italy
Seitz W., Zazzaro A.
1 Introduction In their fundamental work on economic sanctions, Hufbauer et al. (1990) define a sanction as the withdrawal or the threat of withdrawal of a customary trade or financial relationship imposed by a Bsender^ against a Btarget^ to promote foreign political objectives. Senders can include international institutions such as the United Nations, coalitions of governments, or individual nations, while targets are most often governments or criminal organizations. The conventional rationale for using broad economic sanctions is that they impose economic deprivation on the population of the target state who responds by withdrawing their support for, or heightening their dissent against, the targeted leaders. These leaders are in turn expected to prefer conceding to the requests of the sender to avoid losing power. The apparent soundness and compelling force of this argument has made economic sanctions a common tool of foreign statecraft and nonviolent intervention since the end of the World War II. Nonetheless, most empirical studies find that sanctions are usually ineffective at producing the changes that senders desire, and at times have proven to be counter-productive (Hufbauer et al. 1990, 2007; Pape 1997; Allen 2005; Whang et al. 2
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