The apparent contradiction between the claims of a general literature and the
arguments of experts on Venezuela might provoke our skepticism about either the
country literature or the general literature. To those who have argued that oil promotes
authoritarianism, Venezuela is just an exceptional case – an outlier, in statistical parlance.
Some observers have even seen a growing centralization of power and an incipient
authoritarianism amid the recent political turmoil in Venezuela, which they have taken as
new evidence in favor of the authoritarian “resource curse.” On the other hand, the
arguments of a wide range of specialists in favor of the oil-democracy link in Venezuela,
one of the oldest oil exporters in the world, might raise our concern that missing variables
mediate the relationship between resource rents and the political regime type, and that
these variables can help explain variation in observed outcomes across resource-rich
countries.