Do sanctions lead to a decline in civil liberties?

In this paper, we examine the effect of US-imposed sanctions on the civil liberties of the targeted countries for the 1972–2014 period. To deal with the problem of selection and to control for the pre-sanction dynamics, we use a potential outcomes framework, which does not rely on the selection of matching variables and has the further advantage of uncovering the effect of the treatment on the outcome variable over time. What we find is that sanctions result in a decline in civil liberties, measured either by the Freedom House civil liberties index or by the Cingranelli and Richards empowerment rights index. The results are robust across various specifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]