Crude Democracy
Natural Resource Wealth and Political Regimes

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.

Reviews & endorsements

“Thad Dunning has produced an outstanding book, founded on a theoretically-sophisticated re-evaluation of the popular and academic consensus linking oil and resource wealth to political authoritarianism. By showing – both in game theoretic and empirical terms – how resource wealth can promote both democracy and authoritarianism, albeit through separate mechanisms, Dunning provides the first account that simultaneously explains the well-known cases of oil-based authoritarianism as well as the oft-overlooked resource-rich democracies. It is an analytical tour-de-force that will likely set the bar for future studies of resource politics, and through its innovative marriage of formal, statistical, and qualitative tools, for comparative politics more generally.”
-Marcus Kurtz, Ohio State University

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Product details

• Date Published: September 2008
• format: Paperback
• isbn: 9780521730754
• length: 350 pages

• dimensions: 229 x 152 x 20 mm
• weight: 0.51kg
• contains: 7 tables
• availability: Available