Resource Windfalls, Political Regimes, and Political Stability

Francesco Caselli and Andrea Tesei
Additional contact information
Francesco Caselli: LSE, CFM, CEP, CEPR, and NBER

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2016, vol. 98, issue 3, 573-590

Abstract: We study theoretically and empirically whether natural resource windfalls affect political regimes. We show that windfalls have no effect on democracies, while they have heterogeneous political consequences in autocracies. In deeply entrenched autocracies, the effect of windfalls is virtually nil, while in moderately entrenched autocracies, windfalls significantly exacerbate the autocratic nature of the political system. To frame the empirical work, we present a simple model in which political incumbents choose the degree of political contestability and potential challengers decide whether to try to unseat the incumbents. The model uncovers a mechanism for the asymmetric impact of resource windfalls on democracies and autocracies, as well as the the differential impact within autocracies.

Keywords: Democratization; Commodity Prices; Resource Curse (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O10 P16 Q0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (112)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/REST_a_00538 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Resource windfalls, political regimes and political stability (2016)
Working Paper: Resource Windfalls, Political Regimes, and Political Stability (2011)
Working Paper: Resource Windfalls, Political Regimes, and Political Stability (2011)
Working Paper: Resource Windfalls, Political Regimes, and Political Stability (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tpr:restat:v:98:y:2016:i:3:p:573-590

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().