Crude Democracy
Natural Resource Wealth and Political Regimes

This book challenges the conventional wisdom that natural resource wealth promotes autocracy.

Thad Dunning (Author)

9780521730754, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 8 September 2008

350 pages, 7 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.51 kg

“Crude Democracy shatters the widely-held view that natural resource wealth breeds authoritarianism. With a potent blend of in-depth fieldwork, formal models, statistical analysis, and small-N comparisons, Dunning carefully elucidates the contrasting political consequences of natural resources, showing that they can surprisingly have a democracy-promoting effect. The result is a work of first-class scholarship that anyone interested in development and democracy needs to read.”
-Richard Snyder, Brown University

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.

1. Does oil promote democracy?
2. The foundations of rentier states
3. Resource rents and the political regime
4. Statistical tests on rents and the regime
5. The democratic effect of rents
6. Rentier democracy in comparative perspective
7. Theoretical extensions
8. Conclusion: whither the resource curse?

Subject Areas: Political economy [KCP], Political structures: democracy [JPHV], Comparative politics [JPB]