Crude Democracy: Natural Resource Wealth and Political Regimes

by Thad Dunning

• ISBN13: 9780521515009
• ISBN10: 0521515009
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-09-08
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book challenges the conventional wisdom that natural resource wealth promotes autocracy. Oil and other forms of mineral wealth can promote both authoritarianism and democracy, the book argues, but they do so through different mechanisms; an understanding of these different mechanisms can help elucidate when either the authoritarian or democratic effects of resource wealth will be relatively strong. Exploiting game-theoretic tools and statistical modeling as well as detailed country case studies and drawing on fieldwork in Latin America and Africa, this book builds and tests a theory that explains political variation across resource-rich states. It will be read by scholars studying the political effects of natural resource wealth in many regions, as well as by those interested in the emergence and persistence of democratic regimes.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	p. xi
List of Tables	p. xiii
Preface and Acknowledgments	p. xv
Does Oil Promote Democracy?	p. 1
The Authoritarian and Democratic Effects of Natural Resources	p. 5
Explaining Variation	p. 15
Method and Plan of the Book	p. 25
The Foundations of Rentier States	p. 37
Sources of Rents	p. 39
Fiscal Effects: Natural Resources and Taxation	p. 45
Toward the Political Effects of Rents	p. 52
Resource Rents and the Political Regime	p. 61
A Model of Coups against Democracy	p. 64
A Model of Democratization	p. 88
Discussion and Interpretation	p. 100
Statistical Tests on Rents and the Regime	p. 107
Concepts and Measures	p. 111
Rents and the Level of Democracy	p. 121
Democratic Transitions and Breakdowns	p. 136
Assessing the Large-N Evidence	p. 140
The Democratic Effect of Rents	p. 148
Case Selection: Probing the Mechanisms	p. 149
Venezuela: The Rise and Demise of Rentier Democracy	p. 152
Rentier Democracy in Comparative Perspective	p. 210
Chile: Class Conflict in a Rentier Democracy	p. 213
Bolivia: Rents, Revolution, and Democracy	p. 231
Ecuador: Oil Booms and Democratization	p. 253
Botswana: An African Anomaly	p. 258
Theoretical Extensions	p. 268
Revenue Volatility	p. 269
The Dutch Disease	p. 272
Resource Ownership	p. 274
Conclusion: Whither the Resource Curse?	p. 278
Crude Democracies and Crude Autocracies	p. 279
Resources and Democracy: A Normative Coda	p. 289
Construction of the Simulations	p. 293
Bibliography	p. 297
Index	p. 317
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