TY  - JOUR
AU  - Treisman,Daniel
TI  - Oil and Democracy in Russia
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 15667
PY  - 2010
Y2  - January 2010
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15667
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15667.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Daniel Treisman
Department of Political Science
UCLA
4289 Bunche Hall
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1472
Tel: 310/794-5875
Fax: 310/825-0778
E-Mail: treisman@polisci.ucla.edu
AB  - Russia is often considered a perfect example of the so-called “resource curse”—the argument that natural resource wealth tends to undermine democracy. Given high oil prices, some observers see the country as virtually condemned to authoritarian government for the foreseeable future. Reexamining various data, I show that such fears are exaggerated. Evidence from around the world suggests that for countries like Russia with an established oil industry, even large increases in the scale of mineral incomes have only a minor effect on the political regime. In addition, Russia—a country with an industrialized economy, a highly educated, urbanized population, and an oil sector that remains majority private-owned—is unlikely to be susceptible to most of the hypothesized pernicious effects of resource dependence.
ER  -