Elena V. McLean

Designing foreign policy: Voters, special interest groups, and economic sanctions

The literature on economic sanctions has long studied sender countries’ policymaking as a simple choice between imposing sanctions to extract concessions from the targeted country and doing nothing. We depart from this simplifying assumption and analyze sanctions as a multifaceted foreign policy instrument. We argue that senders design sanction policies in response to policy preferences of two domestic constituencies. Voters expect a response to an international dispute in the form of some policy, such as economic sanctions; hence, the sender’s policymakers seek to demonstrate their competence in foreign affairs by imposing sanctions. Once the policymakers announce the use of sanctions, special interest groups that stand to experience economic losses when this foreign policy is implemented pressure the policymakers to choose sanction measures limiting such losses. As a result, the policymakers design sanction policies to include measures that will be less detrimental to special interest groups. We test our theoretical argument using the Threat and Imposition of Sanctions data and show that, while pressures from public opinion increase the likelihood of sanctions, special interest groups that benefit from the relationship with the target country are associated with a lower probability of the use of sanction measures that would impose substantial costs on domestic interest groups.

A strategic theory of international environmental assistance

Over the past three decades multilateral financial aid has become an important institutional arrangement enabling environmental cooperation between developed and developing countries. However, previous research suggests that financial institutions are largely ineffective in achieving environmental goals. I show that financial assistance can be successful in increasing recipients’ contributions to environmental programs, thereby promoting environmental protection. This positive impact of aid, I argue, should be attributed to the effects of donor-recipient interactions that can alter incentives of recipient governments and induce their cooperation rather than to capacity building through inflows of aid. I study environmental assistance by first developing a game-theoretic model of strategic interaction between the donor and aid recipients. To avoid a common methodological problem of misspecification and to unify theory with empirical testing, I then derive a strategic statistical model and conduct empirical tests using a new dataset on projects financed by the Global Environment Facility.

Inducing independence: A strategic model of World Bank assistance and legal reform

Legal reforms matter for economic growth and democratic consolidation. As part of the “second-generation reforms”, international financial institutions have sought to build the rule of law by funding a vast array of legal and judicial reform projects throughout the developing world. Yet aside from scattered anecdotal evidence, the general effects of international assistance on legal reform and the rule of law remain poorly understood. This article addresses this gap by developing a theoretical framework that explores the strategic interaction among international financial institutions, national governments and non-governmental actors. Using original data on World Bank legal and judicial reform projects, we show that World Bank assistance can in fact encourage some types of incumbent governments to promote reforms that increase judicial independence.

Economic sanctions and the dynamics of terrorist campaigns

Although states rarely use economic sanctions specifically to combat transnational terrorism, potential targets of sanctions often face terrorist campaigns within their territory. States may avoid using sanctions against states with terrorists for fear of weakening target states excessively, thereby indirectly strengthening terrorist groups. However, this argument has not been subjected to rigorous empirical testing. This study presents a theoretical and empirical examination that explores how the imposition of sanctions affects the dynamics of ongoing terrorist campaigns in the targeted state. We argue that comprehensive sanctions that are imposed on targets that are fighting transnational terrorists within their territory should make these groups more resistant to collapse. However, similar sanctions imposed against states that serve as “home bases” or sanctuaries to terrorists should shorten the lifespan of these groups. Our empirical analysis yields results largely supportive of these theoretical expectations.

Economic Sanctions, Transnational Terrorism, and the Incentive to Misrepresent

Can economic sanctions combat transnational terrorism effectively? Policy makers argue that sanctions can deter state sponsorship but are counterproductive against hosts of transnational terrorists. However, recent cases indicate that governments are often uncertain if foreign states are truly sponsors versus hosts and cannot perfectly determine the type of foreign support terrorists are receiving. We argue that this uncertainty, coupled with the proposed strategy of punishing sponsors while cooperating with hosts, creates incentives for sponsors to misrepresent themselves as host states while continuing their support for terrorists. We demonstrate that in this environment of uncertainty, governments rely on information regarding the state capacity of supporting states to deduce their relationship with terrorists. Consequently, governments are more likely to impose sanctions against foreign states with intermediate levels of state capacity but are less likely to impose sanctions against failing or stronger states.

Natural Disasters and the Size of Nations

ABSTRACT What is the relationship between natural disasters and country size? Is an increasing likelihood of environmental shocks linked to political integration or secessionism? We argue that natural disasters are associated with a decline in country size. This relationship arises because costs generated by disasters are higher for citizens located farther away from the political center of a country, and costs are amplified as disasters affect a larger area in a country, which in turn makes it less desirable for citizens in remote regions to remain part of a larger country. Our empirical results show that greater risks of environmental shocks are indeed associated with smaller countries, as well as smaller administrative units.