To Russia with love? The impact of sanctions on regime support

Robert Gold, Julian Hinz and Michele Valsecchi

No 2212, Kiel Working Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel)

Abstract: Do economic sanctions affect internal support of sanctioned countries' governments? To answer this question, we focus on the sanctions imposed on Russia in 2014 and identify their effect on voting behavior in both presidential and parliamentary elections. On the economic side, the sanctions significantly hurt Russia's foreign trade - with regional-level variation. We use trade losses caused by the sanctions as measure for regional sanction exposure. For identification, we rely on a structural gravity model that allows us to compare observed trade flows to counterfactual flows in the absence of sanctions. Difference-in-differences estimations reveal that regime support significantly increases in response to the sanctions, at the expense of voting support of Communist parties. For the average Russian district, sanction exposure increases the vote share gained by president Putin and his party by 13 percent. Event studies and placebo estimations confirm the validity of our results.

Keywords: Economic sanctions; voting behavior; gravity estimation; rally-around-the-flag (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F12 F14 F15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-cis, nep-int, nep-pol and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/271031/1/1841215252.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: To Russia with Love? The Impact of Sanctions on Regime Support (2024)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:ifwkwp:2212

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Kiel Working Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (econstor@zbw-workspace.eu).