International sanctions and domestic backlash. Exploring public support towards the EU's rule of law enforcement
2025-12-03
Does communicating sanctions change how they are perceived by citizens in the target country? In this paper, we argue that not only sanction design, but also the framing of international sanctions and their endorsement by political actors can increase citizens’ support for sanctions. We test this argument in the case of the European Union and using conjoint experiments in Hungary, Poland, and Bulgaria. Our results show that both framing and cueing seem to matter in addition to the question of how sanctions are designed. While it is important for public support that procedural fairness is incorporated in designing the sanctions, framing sanctions in terms of protecting the rule of law and obtaining support from the domestic opposition seems to matter just as much.