Do Natural Resources Fuel Authoritarianism? A Reappraisal of the Resource Curse” May. Presented at workshop on

Abstract: Is there a relationship between “point source ” natural resource dependence and authoritarianism? In order to answer this question we develop unique datasets that allow us to focus on within-country variance in resource dependence and regime types. Our results indicate that dependence on oil and minerals is not associated with the undermining of democracy or less complete transitions to democracy. Our results are at variance with a large body of scholarship that finds a negative relationship between natural resource dependence and democracy using pooled cross sectional techniques. We therefore subject those cross-sectional results to a battery of standard diagnostics, and find that the results reported in that literature are very fragile—and the source of that fragility is the use of pooled cross-sectional data to address a question about change over time. We suggest that when researchers are testing theories about processes that take place within countries over time, assembling time-series datasets designed to operationalize explicitly specified counterfactuals is a better match between theory and empirics than regressions centered on the cross-sectional analysis of longitudinall