"Does Oil Hinder Democracy" by Michael L. Ross, 2001
Despite the fact that the claim that "oil impedes democracy" had been used to explain the authoritarian nature of oil exporting states in the Middle East, prior to 2001 no one had ever tested this claim using large-N statistical analysis. Ross does exactly this, and concludes that his findings vindicate claims made by both modernization theory and rentier state theory.
-link to article http://www.cmsconsultores.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/doesoil.pdf
Michael Herb constructed a new data set that controlled for wealth generated by rents, and when he controlled for this he did not find any evidence that rentierism has 'a negative net effect on democracy'. Herb explains that part of the reason for this finding is that the definition of rentierism means that rentier states destined to come from the worlds poorest states and are thus according to modernization theory is also more likely to be authoritarian, thus any relationship is probably spurious.
- link to article http://pomed.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Herb_No-Representation-without-Taxation.pdf
Hard Times in the Land of Plenty: Oil Politics in Iran and Indonesia by Benjamin Smith 2007
"That natural resources can be a curse as well as a blessing is almost a truism in political analysis. In many late-developing countries, the "resource curse" theory predicts, the exploitation of valuable resources will not result in stable, prosperous states but rather in their opposite. Petroleum deposits, for example, may generate so much income that rulers will have little need to establish efficient, tax-extracting bureaucracies, leading to shallow, poorly functioning administrations that remain at the mercy of the world market for oil. Alternatively, resources may be geographically concentrated, thereby intensifying regional, ethnic, or other divisive tensions.Focusing on the roles of state actors and organized opposition in using oil revenues, Smith finds that the effects of oil wealth on politics and on regime durability vary according to the circumstances under which oil exports became a major part of a country's economy. The presence of natural resources is, he argues, a political opportunity rather than simply a structural variable." (Publisher's summary)
Crude Democracy by Thad Dunning 2008
"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." (publisher's summary)
-link to the front matter courtesy of CUP http://assets.cambridge.org/97805217/30754/frontmatter/9780521730754_frontmatter.pdf
"Oil and Democracy Revisted" by Michael L. Ross 2009
In this paper, Ross revists many of his claims and admits that many of his findings in the original 2001 article were baised because the model 'conflates the survival of democracies and the survival of authoritarianism'. Additionally, using dependence on oil revenue as the main explanitory variable biased the results in favor of the arguement and there were also problems with missing data in the statistical analysis. Additionally, Ross admits that there is a spurious relationship between oil, poverty and authoritarianism as argued by Herb. Despite all of this, Ross claims that there is still evidence that rentierism hinders democracy, even if the other causal mechanisms that he pointed out in the original arguements have been disproven.
-link to this working paper http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/ross/Oil%20and%20Democracy%20Revisited.pdf
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