Natural Resource Politics

Crude Democracy: Natural Resource Wealth and Political Regimes. 2008. Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics, Cambridge University Press.

Book-jacket description: 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.

    Available from Cambridge University Press, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble.

Winner of the best book award from the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association and the Gaddis Smith International Book Prize, for the best first book on an international subject by a member of the Yale faculty. The dissertation on which the book is based also won the Mancur Olson Prize from the Political Economy Section of the American Political Science Association, for the best dissertation in the field of political economy completed in the previous two years.

Endogenous Oil Rents. 2010. Comparative Political Studies 43 (4). A supplementary figure showing the Venezuelan state’s take of net oil income is here. Online version published as doi: 0010414009352649v1 (2009).

Resource Dependence, Economic Performance and Political Stability. 2005. The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Volume 49, Number 4: 451-482.

Oil and the Political Economy of Conflict in Colombia and Beyond: A linkages approach. 2004. Geopolitics, 9 (1) (with Leslie Wirpsa).

Reviews and reports:

Comment on Daniel Lederman and William Maloney, “In Search of the Missing Resource Curse.” 2009. Economia 9 (1).