Who Rallies Round the Flag? The Impact of the US Sanctions on Iranians’ Attitude Toward the Government

Babak RezaeeDaryakenari
Additional contact information
Babak RezaeeDaryakenari: Leiden University

No r7ae4, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: While politicians often argue that economic sanctions can induce policy changes in targeted states by undermining elite and public support for the reigning government, the efficacy of these measures, particularly against non-democratic regimes, is debatable. We propose that, counterintuitively, economic sanctions can bolster rather than diminish support for the sanctioned government, even in non-democratic contexts. However, this support shift and its magnitude can differ across various political factions and depend on the nature of the sanctions. To empirically evaluate our theoretical expectations, we use supervised machine learning to scrutinize nearly 2 million tweets from over 1,000 Iranian influencers, assessing their responses to both comprehensive and targeted sanctions during Donald Trump’s presidency. Our analysis shows that comprehensive sanctions generally improved sentiments toward the Iranian government, even among its moderate oppositions, rendering them more aligned with the state's stance. Conversely, while targeted sanctions elicited a milder rally-around-the-flag response, the identity of the targeted entity plays a crucial role in determining the scale of this reaction.

Date: 2024-08-29
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/66cdb5e3c1adca312eb02d6c/

Related works:
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:osf:socarx:r7ae4

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/r7ae4

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SocArXiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().