📌 Research Question and Puzzle

Recent work argues that democracies are generally more vulnerable to economic coercion than authoritarian regimes, yet most sanctions target nondemocratic states. This article reconciles that puzzle by arguing that authoritarians are resilient to sanctions most of the time—but become unusually vulnerable during specific "windows of opportunity" created by domestic instability.

📊 How vulnerability was tested

• The core hypothesis examines the interaction between regime type and domestic instability: whether sanctions are more effective against authoritarian governments when those governments face domestic unrest.
• Domestic instability is treated as demonstrative unrest that can both indicate and produce deeper structural crises in non-democracies.
• Evidence comes from a series of selection-corrected regressions that account for the nonrandom targeting of sanctions.

🔍 Key Findings

• Authoritarian regimes are generally more robust to sanctions than democracies at most times.
• However, when domestic instability is present, authoritarian regimes display substantially greater vulnerability to sanctions.
• The interaction between regime type and domestic unrest is statistically significant in selection-corrected models, supporting the claim that timing matters when sanctioning autocrats.

🧭 Why It Matters

• Domestic protests in democracies are often treated as routine political contestation; in authoritarian settings the same unrest can signal deep and exploitable crises.
• For policymakers, the results imply that the effectiveness of sanctions against nondemocratic targets depends critically on timing relative to domestic instability.
• For scholars, the findings highlight the importance of modeling interactions between regime characteristics and internal unrest and of correcting for selection into sanction targeting.