Conditional Humanitarianism: Citizen Preferences for Economic Sanctions in Democratic Sender States
2026-05-11
Economic sanctions are a critical tool of international diplomacy. Existing scholarship shows that citizens in democratic sender states value sanctions that are effective in producing policy concessions. However, they also seek to limit the adverse humanitarian consequences of sanction imposition. How do citizens trade off these objectives against each other? We develop a theory of sanctions preferences where citizens (1) value policy concessions, (2) hold humanitarian motivations and (3) hold beliefs about how policy change occurs in autocracies. We argue that citizens are conditional humanitarians – humanitarian concerns dominate effectiveness considerations only if policy concessions are unlikely. Results from a pre-registered willingness-to-pay experiment examining the preferences of German citizens on sanctions against Russia after its invasion of Ukraine confirm the predictions of our theory.