Does natural resource wealth promote authoritarianism? At first glance, the
causal connection between inanimate objects of value lying beneath the earth’s surface --
such as hydrocarbon fossil fuels, kimberlite diamonds, or copper deposits -- and crossnational
patterns of access to political power might seem obscure. Yet many political
scientists increasingly believe that such resources prolong or even foster authoritarian
forms of rule. The key to understanding this connection, they argue, is to analyze the
political incentives produced by resource “rents” – that is, the extraordinary profits, often
associated with the extraction of oil and other minerals, which flow directly into the fiscal
coffers of the government but require neither an elaborate tax bureaucracy nor the
projection of the state’s power into the domestic affairs of its citizens. Empirical evidence
from authoritarian regimes in many resource-rich countries suggests that by controlling
the state, political elites can accumulate enormous personal wealth, plausibly increasing
the benefits to elites of holding political power rather than investing in other forms of
economic or social power. Moreover, rents appear to give authoritarian elites powerful
technologies with which to ward off challenges to their rule: elites may use rents to
strengthen the state’s military-repressive apparatus or to coopt the political opposition
with material inducements (Ross 2001). A growing body of cross-national evidence,
from case studies of resource-rich regimes in Africa and the Middle East to cross-national
regressions, seems to support an “emerging wisdom” among political economists that
resource rents promote authoritarianism.