Do Natural Resources Fuel Authoritarianism? A Reappraisal of the Resource Curse

Is there a relationship between 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 resource dependence is not associated with the undermining of democracy, the persistence of authoritarianism, 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 in cross section. 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 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 longitudinally truncated data.