It is a common claim that the most important senders of economic sanctions, the European Union and the United States, frequently shy away from sanctioning serious offenders of the liberal world order. However, we do not possess any systematic knowledge about the strategic and economic conditions under which these two powers are soft-pedaling or overreacting to the (mis-)behavior of real or potential target states. This article examines the bias of the unilateral and joint sanctions of these two senders by comparing their reactions to a variety of violations of international norms, including a worsening human rights situation, election fraud, coups and disrespect of other states’ integrity. We present the newly created EUSANCT dataset which covers sanctions and sanction threats by the European Union, the United States and the United Nations from 1989 to 2015. We introduce a twofold selection mechanism – the decision to impose a sanction and the scaling of the sanction – and provide a counterfactual analysis of how biased sanctions of the Western powers are. We find that while the EU is more reluctant to sanction powerful countries than the US, both senders are hesitant to sanction targets which are economically important to them. Moreover, the burdensome decision-making process in the European Union makes it likely that the EU scales down the sanction to an extent that they are often purely symbolic in the end.

Bio: Gerald Schneider is Chair in International Relations at the University of Konstanz. His  main areas of research are European Union decision making, the causes and consequences of armed violence, the international political economy of financial markets, bargaining theory and conflict management. He has published around 180 articles in various journals and volumes. Schneider is a former President of the European Political Science Association (2013-2015) and Vice President of the International Studies Association (2003-2004) and has acted as Program Chair for the 50th annual convention of ISA in New York City in 2009. He has worked as a consultant and referee for numerous organizations, including the World Bank and the U.S. National Science Foundation.