International sanctions force democratic governments to follow their own constitutions more strictly, while having the exact opposite effect on autocracies.
April 25, 2026
Original Paper
International Sanctions and Constitutional Compliance
SSRN · 6633098
The Takeaway
Global pressure acts as a magnifying glass for a country's existing legal culture. In democracies, the fear of sanctions makes leaders more careful to stay within the bounds of the rule of law to maintain legitimacy. In autocratic regimes, the same sanctions cause leaders to abandon their own constitutions to survive and consolidate power. This means that a tool intended to encourage better behavior can actually make a dictator more dangerous and lawless. We assume that sanctions work the same way everywhere, but the political foundation of a country determines the result. Designing effective foreign policy requires understanding that punishment can backfire depending on the regime.
From the abstract
Judging governments' responses to international sanctions based on their compliance with a universal human rights standard can be criticized as an imposition of Western values. We propose an alternative benchmark for government action that is not subject to the same potential criticism: whether governments comply with their own national constitutions as codified forms of the social contract. Our analysis of 182 countries from 1962 to 2022 using state-of-the-art panel DiD and event study estimato