Please join CUIPS for TImothy Frye's presentation, "Economic Sanctions and Public Opinion: Survey Experiments from Russia." A light lunch will be served at 12:15pm followed by the talk at 12:30pm.
Abstract: Do economic sanctions turn the public against the government or cause it to rally around the flag? Do government supporters and skeptics respond differently to sanctions? Do sanctions shape attitudes toward the sanctioner? These questions have rarely been explored with survey data, and not in an autocracy. Survey experiments embedded in two national surveys in Russia find that, in contrast to the “orthodox” and the “rally around flag” theories, economic sanctions do not have a direct effect on support for the sanctioned government. However, in line with “scapegoating” arguments, sanctions weaken the impact of economic decline on support for the government. In addition, imposing economic sanctions reduces the favorability of the sanctioner, but the promise of weakening sanctions yields an increase in support for both the target country and the sanctioner. These results suggest the need to reevaluate core assumptions of theories of the impact of economic sanctions.
