Crude Democracy

Thad Dunning is Assistant Professor of Political Science and a research fellow at Yale's Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies as well as the Institution for Social and Policy Studies. He studies comparative politics, political economy, international relations, and methodology. His book, Crude Democracy: Natural Resource Wealth and Political Regimes, studies the democratic and authoritarian effects of natural resource wealth. The dissertation on which the book is based won the Mancur Olson Prize of the Political Economy Section of the American Political Science Association, for the best dissertation completed in the previous two years. Dunning conducts field research in Latin America and Africa and has written on a range of methodological topics, including econometric corrections for selection effects and the use of natural experiments in the social sciences.

“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

• 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?