Description
While advances in targeted sanctions policy have enabled senders to apply greater and greater levels of targeted economic pressure, sanctions rarely prompt elites to pressure their leader into compliance. Extant literature has argued that by providing compensation for losses caused by sanctions, targeted leaders can retain the loyalty of elites. However, in this paper, I argue that the structure of elite interactions in the target state serves as an additional barrier to sanctions effectiveness. For an elite to pressure the leader into compliance, he must collude with others, however, in the process of finding fellow elites to collude with, he risks propositioning to another who is loyal to the leader and reports the collusion attempt, resulting in severe consequences including imprisonment and death. Thus I develop a typology for understanding the strategies available to targeted elites: resistance, silence, and loyalty. I design a formal model which demonstrates that even when an elite has a strong preference for compliance, the risk of being discovered and punished for disloyalty outweighs the economic harm experienced as a result of sanctions, resulting in silence as the equilibrium strategy. My findings offer a novel explanation for why sanctions on authoritarian regimes are rarely successful.
