Voting to Punish Within: Sanctioning Democratic Backsliding in Parliamentary Bodies of European Regional IOs

The literature has established that there is strong variation in whether Regional Intergovernmental Organisations (RIOs) respond to violations of democratic norms. However, there is also considerable variation in preferences within RIOs about whether sanctions should be used to punish any given perpetrator. If we want to understand better why RIOs use sanctions so rarely (especially when the RIO is highly democratic and when using sanctions against their own members) and what the obstacles for using them are, we need to ascertain why and how attitudes toward sanctions against a given country or target government differ within an RIO. Our paper presents a party-political theory of decisions about sanctions in the parliamentary assemblies of democratic RIOs. The theory includes both instrumental and principled behaviour by Regional Assembly members, which results from their ideological orientation and interacts with characteristics of their home country. Regional Assembly members’ ideological orientation relates to their partisan proximity to the target government, their commitment to liberal democracy, and attitude towards regional integration. The relevant characteristics of their home country are the quality of democracy and the extent of a domestic threat to liberal democracy. We test the theory in a multilevel analysis of votes in the European Parliament and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe about using sanctions to respond to democratic backsliding in Hungary, Poland, and Turkey.