Given the US president’s leading role in many areas of American foreign policy, one might expect the president to prevail in executive-legislative clashes over economic sanctions. In this paper, I show that, with surprising frequency, US legislators overcome presidential opposition to their sanctions proposals and induce the president to take foreign policy actions that he or she would not otherwise take. My argument explains why the president often signs and implements sanctions legislation despite considering it inadvisable, as well as how sanctions legislation can influence foreign policy actions, the behavior of foreign governments, or international diplomacy in other ways. I support the argument with descriptive statistics based on an original data set of over a hundred legislative sanctions proposals and a case study of the effects of legislative initiatives targeting Iran over a period of two decades. The paper’s findings show that legislative activity is more important than some previous research on sanctions and US foreign policy suggests.

中文翻译：

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强迫总统的手：美国国会如何通过制裁立法塑造外交政策

鉴于美国总统在美国外交政策的许多领域中的领导作用，人们可能会期望总统在经济制裁的行政立法冲突中占上风。在本文中，我表明，美国立法者以惊人的频率克服总统对其制裁提案的反对，并诱使总统采取他或她不会采取的外交政策行动。我的论点解释了为什么总统经常签署和实施制裁立法，尽管认为这是不可取的，以及制裁立法如何以其他方式影响外交政策行动、外国政府的行为或国际外交。我支持基于 100 多个立法制裁提案的原始数据集的描述性统计数据的论点，以及针对伊朗的立法举措在 20 年内的影响的案例研究。该论文的调查结果表明，立法活动比之前关于制裁和美国外交政策的一些研究表明的更为重要。