The use of economic coercion has been an increasingly popular foreign policy instrument for policymakers over the years. However, the literature on economic sanctions present conflicting results and generally assume that economic sanctions do not work. This paper aims to answer why sanctions do not work. To answer this question, I examine the black box of decision-making mechanisms within states. This study explores the role of leading veto players within the political apparatus on economic sanctions effectiveness. By using game theoretical models, this study contributes to the literature with its interpretive aspect by showing the underlying interaction between economic sanctions sender and target states to the massive body of empirical studies on economic sanctions. The games generate a heuristic scale of effectiveness in which the highest level of effectiveness is observed in democratic target states where there is a nonsupporting main opposition party in the target state. Conversely, the lowest effectiveness is observed in democratic target states where the target state's opposition is against economic sanctions and supporting the sender state policies. The Threat and Imposition of Economic Sanctions (TIES) dataset was used when calculating the Bayesian probabilities for player strategies. This study also suggests that although states prefer to use economic sanctions more often for disputes related to non-security issues, sanctions work better for security-related dispute types.