Are tougher political sanctions better? A statistical model compares political and economic relationships to success

Before beginning its war of aggression against Ukraine in 2022, Russia had already conducted an aerial bombardment of Georgia in 2008 and invaded Crimea as well as the Donbas region in 2014. This has left politicians and researchers puzzling over the question: Would it have been possible to prevent the current war in Ukraine if countries had implemented more decisive and intensive sanction policies back then?

In a new study, Gerald Schneider, a professor of international politics at the University of Konstanz, and Thies Niemeier, a doctoral researcher at the Konstanz Graduate School of the Social and Behavioural Sciences (GSBS), project how effective tougher sanctions could have been. The work is published in the journal Research & Politics.

Their assessment is based on a statistical model that compares the political and economic relationships between countries to the success of sanctions. This allows them to identify the factors that are likely to make sanctions more successful. These variables include a higher intensity of sanctions, closer economic ties to the sanctioned country and the country’s history of having been a colony of a European country.

Taking lessons from the past

“It is extremely important for politicians to be able to fully assess the likely consequences of various political measures. Ideally, they should be able to evaluate these effects ahead of time and decide accordingly,” says lead author Niemeier.

However, even afterwards it is useful to draw conclusions about the connection between the strength of sanctions and their impact. The researchers use “counterfactual scenarios” to analyze what would have happened differently if certain political measures had been taken earlier, had been more robust or had been implemented differently.

Niemeier and Schneider studied sanctions levied against Egypt, Burundi, Mali and Russia by the European Union and the United States. They classify sanctions into different degrees of intensity. According to their model, examples of “light measures” include restrictions on the freedom of movement of specific Russian oligarchs implemented after 2014, as well as barriers to investment by individual Russian companies.

Further categories of sanctions involve steps like banning the arms trade and freezing development aid or limiting trade in certain industrial sectors. The toughest category includes wide-ranging economic embargoes, like those once introduced against South Africa and currently imposed on Russia.

The greater the intensity, the greater the effectiveness

The researchers found that—at least with regard to the EU—robust measures in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the invasion of the Donbas region would have had a greater impact than the moderate approach that had been used.

“When they are more credible and costly for the target country, economic sanctions are more likely to induce the country to make concessions,” says Schneider. Especially in Africa, it has proven successful on several occasions for the EU or U.S. along with the African Union or the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to mount a quick, robust response.

What about Russia? “Our models suggest that intensive sanctions in 2014 would have had a high probability of increasing the cost of future aggression and making President Putin more willing to negotiate,” Schneider explains. “Even if they would probably not have been enough to move Russia to withdraw from Crimea.”

The political scientists base this projection on the close economic and political ties between the EU and Russia as well as the resulting negotiating power of Brussels.

Schneider concludes, “The 2014 sanctions that were watered down as the result of lobbying from the financial and energy industries reinforced President Putin’s mistaken belief that increasing the level of aggression against Ukraine would result in only a few costly sanctions.”

According to the study, while tougher EU sanctions would have made Russia more willing to make concessions, similar measures by the U.S. would have had little success. The model predicts that stronger sanctions by the Western superpower do not necessarily have a greater impact.

US-American strategies in sanctioning

According to the study, the intensity of economic ties to the sanctioned country generally influences how effective sanctions will turn out to be. Being the Western superpower, the United States can follow a different strategy when sanctioning countries.

“When a world power like the United States threatens sanctions, the countries facing the prospect of these sanctions tend to back down so that the sanctions do not actually have to be imposed on them,” Niemeier explains. “Another factor is that the US sometimes enacts strong economic sanctions against countries that depend little on the US economy. These sanctions cannot be successful if they do not cause economic pressure.”