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Do Natural Resources Fuel Authoritarianism? A Reappraisal of the Resource Curse
Open accessAbstract
A large body of scholarship finds a negative relationship between natural resources and democracy. Extant cross-country regressions, however, assume random effects and are run on panel datasets with relatively short time dimensions. Because natural resource reliance is not an exogenous variable, this is not an effective strategy for uncovering causal relationships. Numerous sources of bias may be driving the results, the most serious of which is omitted variable bias induced by unobserved country-specific and time-invariant heterogeneity. To address these problems, we develop unique historical datasets, employ time-series centric techniques, and operationalize explicitly specified counterfactuals. We test to see if there is a long-run relationship between resource reliance and regime type within countries over time, both on a country-by-country basis and across several different panels. We find that increases in resource reliance are not associated with authoritarianism. In fact, in many specifications we generate results that suggest a resource blessing.
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“Economic variables—including the overall availability of economic resources and the manner in which those resources are distributed—provide partial answers to that question [3], [4], [5], [6].”
From Pathogens and Politics: Further Evidence That Parasite Prevalence Predicts Authoritarianism (2013) · cites this paper as [4]
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Metadata
- Authors
- HABER, S., & MENALDO, V.
- Affiliations
- Hoover Institution (US)
- University of Washington (US)
- Corresponding author
- HABER, STEPHEN
- MENALDO, VICTOR
- ORCID
- MENALDO, VICTOR
- Venue
- American Political Science Review
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 2011-01-27
- Volume
- 105
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 1-26
- ISSN
- 0003-0554 (ISSN-L)
- 1537-5943
- OpenAlex
- W2114260857
- Cited by
- 1,128
- References
- 105
- Citations by year
- 2026: 40 · 2025: 42 · 2024: 45 · 2023: 69 · 2022: 89 · 2021: 52 · 2020: 134 · 2019: 81 · 2018: 99 · 2017: 79 · 2016: 70 · 2015: 76 · 2014: 60 · 2013: 64 · 2012: 66
- FWCI
- 188.93
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- papers.ssrn.com
- Locations
- American Political Science Review (publishedVersion)
- SSRN Electronic Journal (submittedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › General Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Natural Resources and Economic Development
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Political Conflict and Governance
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Corruption and Economic Development
- Keywords
- resource curse, natural resources, authoritarianism, democracy, resource dependence, political regimes, omitted variable bias, counterfactual analysis, resource blessing
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