Aid Sanctions and Hybrid Regimes

Recent advances combining sanctions scholarship and the study of authoritarianism relate sanctions effectiveness to regime type. These studies generally conclude that economic sanctions tend to be more effective on democracies than on autocracies, but also on weakly institutionalised autocracies rather than on other authoritarian types. This literature at the intersection between international relations and comparative politics focuses on the democracy-autocracy dichotomy, or the categorization of autocratic types, to the detriment of the exploration of ‘hybrid’ regime types. Equally importantly, it has neglected examining the impact of aid suspensions as a subcategory of sanctions (Nielsen, 2013). We address these deficits by investigating whether (i) the autocratic type or the level of democratic openness of the target better predicts sanctions effectiveness, (ii) whether hybrid regimes behave like closed autocracies or like democracies under sanctions, and (iii) whether aid suspensions perform similarly than other sanctions in terms of effectiveness. The hypotheses are tested on an original dataset rich in aid sanctions.