Replication Data for: Sanctions and Target Public Opinion: Experimental Evidence from Turkey

The research on economic sanctions effectiveness has highlighted the importance of public opinion. Yet the effect of sanctions on public opinion has attracted relatively limited scholarly attention. The few recent studies on this question report mixed findings. In this essay, I investigate the role of uncertainty over intentions in influencing public support for policy change in the target state. The literature on crisis bargaining have identified asymmetric information as a key problem. Studies on sanctions also highlight how sanctioning states (i.e. senders) often have unclear goals. Yet we do not have any firm evidence about how such uncertainties would affect public opinion. How do uncertainties about the intentions of the sender affect public support for policy change in the sanctioned (i.e. target) country? I argue that individuals would be less supportive of policy-change when they suspect that the sender has ‘ulterior motives’ or a ‘hidden agenda’. I field a pre-registered online survey experiment in Turkey using the recent U.S. sanctions to test this claim. The findings suggest that uncertainty has a negative impact on support for policy change, but only among certain subgroups. The main analysis is complemented by automated text analysis of respondents’ answers to provide suggestive evidence about uncertainty's negative impact.

有关经济制裁有效性的研究已凸显出公众舆论的关键作用。然而，制裁对公众舆论的影响却相对较少受到学界关注。近期为数不多针对该议题的研究，得出了混杂不一的结论。
在本文中，笔者探讨了意图不确定性对制裁目标国公众支持政策变革的影响。危机谈判领域的研究已将信息不对称视为核心问题，制裁相关研究也指出，实施制裁的国家（即制裁发送方）往往目标模糊不清。但目前尚无确凿证据表明，此类不确定性会对公众舆论产生何种影响。那么，制裁发送方的意图不确定性，会如何影响受制裁（即目标）国家公众对政策变革的支持度呢？
笔者提出如下论点：当民众怀疑制裁发送方存在“别有用心”或“隐藏议程”时，其对政策变革的支持意愿会有所降低。笔者以近期美国对土耳其实施的制裁为研究场景，开展了一项预先注册的线上调查实验，以此验证这一论点。研究结果显示，不确定性对政策变革支持度存在负向影响，但该效应仅在特定亚群体中显现。主分析还辅以对受访者作答内容的自动化文本分析，为不确定性的负向影响提供了补充性佐证证据。