Skip to content

Taking the streets? Disentangling the impact of sanction threats on mass protest

Literature › Works

Julia Grauvogel; Amanda Licht; Christian von Soest (2014). Taking the streets? Disentangling the impact of sanction threats on mass protest. GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies / Binghamton University (SUNY).
Type working paper
Scope Comparative and methods
Method econometric
Period studied 1990–2005
Regions Cross-national: Latin America, Middle East and North Africa, Asia (76 countries); South Africa only as an illustrative case in the literature review
Themes sanctions divestment, resistance social movements, comparative theory, methods data sources
Citation key grauvogel2014

Argument

The paper argues that sanctions work on domestic opposition through a signalling channel as well as through economic deprivation. Threats of sanctions signal foreign disapproval of the regime and support for the opposition, which raises the perceived opportunity for protest without imposing economic costs. The authors merge the TIES sanctions dataset with the Protest and Response dataset into a country-month panel for 1990-2005. They model a large month-to-month rise in protest with logit regressions. New threats significantly raise the probability of a protest surge, while imposed sanctions do not. Hypotheses that human rights threats, multilateral threats, and narrow imposed sanctions have stronger effects are not supported.

Evidence and method

Country-month panel (1990-2005) combining TIES version 4 (Morgan, Bapat and Kobayashi 2013) with the Protest and Response dataset (Regan 2012, Clark 2014). Controls come from Freedom House press freedom, Polity, and the CIRI Physical Integrity scale. N is about 13,000-14,300 country-months, clustered on 76 countries. South Africa appears only through secondary literature (Kaempfer et al. 1995; Arya 2008; Crawford and Klotz 1999; Minear et al. 1998).

Findings

  • New sanction threats significantly raise the probability of a protest surge, in all three specifications. (p. 15)

    the initiation of a new threat produces a statistically significantly increased risk of domestic unrest. The boost in probability is small, about .035, but in relative terms this is a 77% increase.

  • Ongoing threats compound the effect of a new threat, and the effect grows if the ongoing episode targets the leadership narrowly. (p. 15)

    one with a new threat and an ongoing one experience 212% higher probability of a significant rise in anti-government activity.

  • Imposed economic sanctions have no statistically significant effect on protest, consistent with the signalling interpretation. (p. 15)

    As expected, imposition of sanctions has little effect on protest activity. In fact, none of the measures of imposed economic sanctions achieve statistical significance.

  • The effect of threats is concentrated in hybrid regimes, is large in democracies, and just misses significance in established autocracies. (p. 16)

    The effect of threats is strongest in hybrid regimes, is large and positive in democratic regimes, and just misses statistical significance in established autocracies.

  • The hypothesis that human rights threats produce stronger protest responses is not supported. (p. 17)

    we did not find statistical support for our hypothesis that new human rights sanctions threats are more likely to produce an increase in protest than threats in general.

  • Narrow (targeted) imposed sanctions do not produce a protest increase either. (p. 17)

    We also did not did not find support for the expectation that the new imposition of narrow or, in other words, targeted sanctions rather than sanctions in general leads to an increase in protest activity.

  • The authors cite the South African case in the literature as an example of sanctions enhancing domestic opposition capacity. (p. 2)

    show how sanctions against South Africa enhanced the ability of domestic anti-apartheid groups to organize strikes and other forms of protest.

  • The South African sanctions literature is used to argue that sanctions boosted the opposition even when their economic impact was mitigated. (p. 3)

    Even when the regime in South African was able to mitigate the sanctions’ economic impact, the sanctions still gave heart to the internal opposition and increased the questioning of the ruling party

  • Recent drops in state accommodation raise the likelihood of large protest increases, while changes in violent repression have no explanatory power. (p. 16)

    changes in the recent patterns of state violence against protesters have no explanatory power. Recent drops in accommodation, however, boost the likelihood of large increases in protest.