Reputation or Interaction: What Determines Cooperation on Economic Sanctions?

This article studies cooperation on multilateral economic sanctions. Despite low effectiveness and sanction-busting, multilateral economic sanctions are a popular tool of foreign policy. We explore an instrumental approach to sanctions and develop a game theory framework where sender states face a collective action problem when coordinating multilateral coercion. We indicate that cooperation can be achieved through repeated interactions and reputation. We test empirically the two mechanisms with the TIES data on economic sanctions and adherence to past sanction regimes and the Correlates of War data on membership in International Organisations. Our results indicate that reputation is a strong predictor of cooperation on multilateral economic coercion. The effect of repeated interaction appears conditional on reputation; states with poor reputation positively mediate its effect through repeated interaction.本文围绕多边经济制裁合作展开研究。尽管多边经济制裁收效有限且存在制裁规避行为，但仍是各国外交政策中备受青睐的工具。本文探索制裁的工具性研究路径，并构建博弈论框架，分析制裁发起国在协调多边施压过程中面临的集体行动困境。研究表明，通过重复互动与声誉机制可实现合作。本文采用经济制裁相关的TIES数据库（包含各国遵守过往制裁制度的相关数据）以及战争关联度数据库（Correlates of War）中的国际组织成员国身份数据，对上述两种机制开展实证检验。研究结果显示，声誉是多边经济施压合作的强有力预测因子；重复互动的影响依赖于声誉水平：声誉不佳的国家可通过重复互动正向调节该效应。