The International Sources of Legislative Action on Sanctions

• In Event: Law, Legislating, and US Foreign Policy

Abstract

When does the U.S. Congress move to impose sanctions on foreign countries? While Congress exercises an influential role on U.S. sanctions policy, little research is dedicated to examining the determinants of sanctions action by U.S. legislators. To address this gap, this paper investigates factors that influence the introduction and approval of sanctions legislation in Congress. Using an original large N dataset of U.S. sanctions legislation from 1989 to 2014, we run a series of logistic regressions to analyze this two-staged process. Starting with the first stage of the process, prior work has emphasized the role of domestic interest groups in driving legislative behavior on sanctions. We argue and find that, that in addition to the influence of domestic interest groups, legislators are also responsive to key international conditions when taking actions involving sanctions. More precisely, we show that legislators are more likely to introduce legislation that impose sanctions on countries whose behavior is worsening in terms of compliance with international norms or threats to international peace and security. Moving on to the second stage, we argue that Congress will be more reluctant to approve sanctions that would impose large economic costs on the United States or result in harmful economic retaliation by the target. We find support for this claim and show that legislators are less likely to approve sanctions legislation targeting a country with which the United States has high levels of economic interdependence. We complement the statistical findings with anecdotal evidence from the case of China. Overall, these findings highlight underappreciated drivers of legislative sanctions activity and reinforce previous research finding that interdependence mitigates disputes between countries.

Authors

• Hana Attia, University of Salzburg

• Jordan Tama, American University