CLINTON CHINESE PUZZLE - DOMESTIC POLITICS AND THE EFFECTIVENESS OF ECONOMIC SANCTIONS

This paper considers recent American attempts to use economic sanctions to alter mainland China's policies on human rights and arms sales. The analysis follows from a formal, general theory of economic sanctions that stresses the importance of domestic politics. The results from the model suggest that sanctions, or the threat of sanctions, should be wholly ineffective in the human rights case but should be able to bring about some changes in Chinese arms sales policy. These results correspond with our empirical observations, indicating that the theory offers a useful explanation for the observed events. This explanation focuses on the political competition among domestic political actors and suggests that sanctions can be effective only when they impose significant costs, relative to the value of the issues at stake, on those domestic actors having the ability to change the targeted policy.