THE POLITICS OF SANCTIONS COMPLIANCE. EXPLAINING SANCTIONS EFFECTIVENESS THROUGH THE LENS OF DOMESTIC VETO PLAYERS. EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FROM THE CASES OF ERITREA, IRAN, AND SUDAN.

Sanctions scholarship overwhelmingly expects that authoritarian states defy and resist the demands attached to sanctions imposed on them. In practice, however, authoritarian states do sometimes accommodate to sanctions-related demands and offer political concessions consistent with them. What explains their choice of compliance or defiance? When do they decide to offer political concessions aligned with sanctions-related demands, and why are those concessions sometimes short-lived and not robust, and why can they be more or less expedited? This research project argues the answer lies in the domestic configuration of institutional and political constraints, also called veto players, of the states under sanctions. As a contribution to the domestic-politics branch of the literature on international sanctions, which has become increasingly more relevant in light of the evolution of sanctions from comprehensive to targeted, this research project aims to investigate the under-researched application of a typically public-policy approach such as the veto player analysis to the literature on international sanctions and understand if and how domestic constraints such as veto players, who cut across regime type classifications that are frequently –but often inconclusively– used in the literature on sanctions, affect the effectiveness of sanctions in achieving the desired political concessions. Differently from previous studies, this project intends to examine this interaction along three different dimensions of the targeted state’s aggregate policy response to sanctions, that are the direction, robustness, and expedition of the policy change which together describe the overall effectiveness of sanctions. To test how three different elements of the configuration of the targeted state’s veto players such as the concentration of the agenda power, the congruence of policy preferences, and the internal cohesion, can affect those three outcome dimensions, the project adopts different methodological strategies. After performing some statistical analyses which expose some issues which remain largely unaddressed by the extant literature and probe alternative hypotheses, the project builds on those findings to develop a new theoretical framework and related spatial model which is applied to few selected comparative case studies to trace how veto power operates inside a state targeted by sanctions and test the hypotheses identified, one per dimension of the policy response to sanctions. This empirical part aims to verify the empirical support for the hypotheses and illustrate how the explanatory power of the veto player lens outperforms explanations that focus instead only on regime type classifications in decoding the politics of sanctions compliance.