elections · Julian Hinz

To Russia with Love? The Impact of Sanctions on Regime Support

Robert Gold — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Sanctions impact on regional exports.

Do economic sanctions affect internal support of sanctioned countries’ governments? To answer this question, we focus on the sanctions imposed on Russia in 2014 and identify their effect on voting behavior in both presidential and parliamentary elections. On the economic side, the sanctions significantly hurt Russia’s foreign trade — with regional variance. We use trade losses caused by the sanctions as measure for regional sanctions exposure. For identification, we rely on a structural gravity model that allows us to compare observed trade flows to counterfactual flows in the absence of sanctions. Difference-in-differences estimations reveal that regime support significantly increases in response to the sanctions, at the expense of voting support of Communist parties. For the average Russian district, sanctions exposure increases the vote share gained by President Putin and his party by 13 percent. Event studies and placebo estimations confirm the validity of our results.

Blowback: The Effect of Sanctions on Democratic Elections

Matthieu Crozet — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Change in vote share for Le Pen and exports of embargoed products by destination.

Sanctions are meant to coerce political adversaries through economic measures. However, evidence for their effectiveness is scarce. In this paper we assess the impact of sanctions on a democracy — France — by studying the electoral consequences of the sanctions and countersanctions imposed between Russia and Western countries. Contrary to most of the existing literature we find clear evidence for exposure to the sanctions to cause an increase in the vote share for pro-Russian (and far-right) candidates during the French 2017 presidential election. Locally, the impact on voting is substantial. Back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate that about 16,300 votes for the main far-right candidate can be directly attributed to the sanctions' impact. This is the total number of votes cast in a medium-sized French city. It is however not nearly enough to have affected the outcome of the election at the national level.