Does Oil Hinder Democracy?
@article{Ross2001DoesOH,
title={Does Oil Hinder Democracy?},
author={Michael L. Ross},
journal={World Politics},
year={2001},
volume={53},
pages={325 - 361},
url={https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:18404}
}Some scholars suggest that the Middle East's oil wealth helps explain its failure to democratize. This article examines three aspects of this "oil impedes democracy" claim. First, is it true? Does oil have a consistently antidemocratic effect on states, once other factors are accounted for? Second, can this claim be generalized? Is it true only in the Middle East or elsewhere as well? Is it true for other types of mineral wealth and other types of commodity wealth or only for oil? Finally, if…
Figures and Tables from this paper
3,204 Citations
But seriously: does oil really hinder democracy?
- 2008
Political Science, Economics
Recent studies have disputed the claim that 'oil hinders democracy,' or raised questions about the causal mechanisms behind it. I re-examine the question of petroleum wealth and regime type, using…
Working Paper 184 - Does Oil Wealth Affect Democracy in Africa?
- 2013
Political Science, Economics
Understanding the effect of oil wealth on democracy is important. National democratic institutions provide a check on governmental power and thereby limit the potential of public officials to amass…
Oil and democracy: More than a cross-country correlation?
- 2010
Political Science, Economics
This article revisits the empirical relationship between oil and democracy. Existing studies establish a negative cross-country correlation between oil and democracy in a Pooled OLS framework. This…
Evaluating Three Theories of Democratization in the Middle East and North Africa
- 2014
Political Science
What accounts for the absence of democratization in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)? For a region with distinctive characteristics such as authoritarian persistence and oil-based economies,…
Does Oil Wealth Affect Democracy in Africa
- 2014
Political Science, Economics
This paper uses recent data on historical oil wealth to provide new evidence on the effect of oil wealth on democracy in Africa from 1955 to 2008. We find that oil wealth is statistically associated…
Refining the Oil Curse
- 2013
Economics, Political Science
Is there a resource curse? Some scholars argue that resource income is associated with slower transitions to democracy; others contend that the negative effects of resources are conditional on…
Do Foreign Investors Punish Democracy? Theory and Empirics, 1984-2001
- 2006
Economics, Political Science
Some claim that when level of property rights protection is controlled, democracy lowers foreign direct investment (FDI) to developing countries ( Li and Resnick 2003 ). We critically examine the…
Does oil really curse democracy? A long-run time-series analysis of 127 countries
- 2018
Political Science, Economics
Does Oil Hinder Democratic Development? A Time-Series Analysis
- 2016
Political Science, Economics
The resource curse is a topic studied intensively in both economics and political science. Much of the focus is now on whether oil affects democratic institutions. We further the debate through the…
The Impact of Oil Dependence on Democracy
- 2012
Political Science, Economics
In this thesis I assess whether the oil dependence of a nation, measured as the percentage of that nation’s exports derived from fuel sales, negatively affects a nation’s level of democracy as…
73 References
Does High Income Promote Democracy?
- 1996
Political Science
The authors construct a statistical model with which to test whether the regularity that democracy is more commonly found among wealthy countries stems from a democratizing effect of high income or…
Rentier Wealth, Unruly Law, and the Rise of Opposition: The Political Economy of Oil States
- 1999
Political Science, Law
The relationship between oil and politics has generated much intellectual debate. The resulting framework called "rentierism" has produced a number of propositions about the nature of the…
Modernization: Theories and Facts
- 1997
Political Science
What makes political regimes rise, endure, and fall? The main question is whether the observed close relation between levels of economic development and the incidence of democratic regimes is due to…
Comparative Democracy: The Economic Development Thesis
- 1994
Economics, Political Science
In comparative politics, an established finding—that economic development fosters democratic performance—has recently come under challenge. We counter this challenge with a dynamic pooled time series…
Dictatorships as a Political Dutch Disease
- 1999
Political Science
We present a model to explain why natural resource windfalls tend not only to lead to slower economic growth but to generate and reinforce authoritarian tendencies in Third World political regimes.…
The Political Economy of the Resource Curse
- 1999
Political Science, Economics
How does a state's natural resource wealth influence its economic development? For the past fifty years, versions of this question have been explored by both economists and political scientists. New…
The rentier state, interest groups, and the paradox of autonomy: state and business in Turkey and Iran
- 1994
Political Science, Business
The low levels of taxation in the Middle East can be the envy of both governments and citizens of industrialized nations. In 1980 direct taxes averaged less than 11 percent of total government…
Dependency and development in Latin America
- 1979
Economics, Political Science
The theory of imperialist capitalism, as is well known, has so far attained its most significant treatment in Lenin’s works. This is not only because Lenin attempts to explain transformations of the…
A Note on Taxation, Development, and Representative Government
- 1985
Political Science, Economics
This article proposes a model representing the relationship between economic actors and revenue seeking governments. Given a need for revenues, the model predicts the allocation of the new tax burden…
The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century
- 1991
Political Science
Between 1974 and 1990 more than 30 countries in Southern Europe, Latin America, East Asia, and Eastern Europe shifted from authoritarian to democratic systems of government. This global democratic…










