unpacking the political resource curse: how oil fuels personalism and undermines
TRANSCRIPT
Unpacking the Political Resource Curse: How Oil Fuels Personalism and Undermines Democratization
by
Farid Guliyev
a Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in Political Science
Approved Dissertation Committee Prof. Dr. Matthijs Bogaards_____________ Name and title of Chair Prof. Dr. Marco Verweij Name and title of Committee Member Prof. Dr. Heiko Pleines Name and title of Committee Member
Date of Defense: December 17, 2014
Humanities and Social Sciences
ii
Abstract
Oil wealth is often associated with prolonged authoritarian rule, poor governance and other institutional pathologies. These unusual effects of petroleum have been variously described as the ‘Paradox of Plenty’ (Karl 1997), ‘Natural Resource Trap’ (Collier 2007), and the ‘Oil Curse’ (Ross 2012), and an increasing number of studies have examined the causes and effects of the oil curse (Humphreys et al. 2007). However, the prevailing assumption in most studies has been that oil will have an equally strong anti-democratic effect across authoritarian regime types (Ross 2001; 2012; Jensen and Wantchekon 2004; Haber and Menaldo 2011). Theoretical and empirical studies on the resource curse have ignored institutional differences in authoritarian rule emphasized by scholars of authoritarian politics (Linz and Stepan 1996; Geddes 1999; Schedler 2009; Geddes, Wright and Frantz 2014). In this study, I combine these two strands of literature and show that oil has a particularly dire effect on the democratization prospects of a particular subtype of authoritarianism, namely, personalist autocracies. Personal rule, or simply personalism, closely related to Weber’s notion of patrimonialism and its modern adaptations, such as Neopatrimonialism (Médard 1982; Clapham 1985; Bratton and Van de Walle 1997), ‘Big Man Rule’ (Hyden 2006) and Sultanism (Chehabi and Linz 1998; Linz 2000; Stepan and Linz 2013), denotes a political regime dominated by a strongman who concentrates all policymaking in his hands, in which political office is occupied by public officials in pursuit of private goals, and in which power is exercised through patron-client networks rather than legal-rational bureaucracy (Roth 1968; Geddes 1999). The analysis of regime development patterns across oil and non-oil producing states presented in this study shows that oil wealth particularly strongly harmed democratization prospects in the personalist sub-set of authoritarianism. Personalist regimes with oil wealth – such as those in Iraq, Libya, and Yemen in the Middle East, Congo (Brazzaville), Cameroon, and Sudan in Sub-Saharan Africa, and Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan in post-Soviet Eurasia – have, unfortunately, successfully avoided transitions to democracy. Oil was a true political “curse” for personalist regimes to a much greater extent than it was for other (party-based and military) categories of authoritarian rule. Using three country-case studies of Azerbaijan, Cameroon, and Venezuela, I illustrate the ways in which oil can reinforce personalism and undermine the democratization processes and suggest that the causal channels linking oil and regime outcomes (authoritarian durability and democratic transitions) depend on the composition of authoritarian rule in place, and may not be uniform across regime types. The case of Venezuela under Chávez also indicates that in democratic regimes with a long history of oil-induced elite corruption, oil wealth may contribute to the personalization of power in a failing democracy.
iii
Acknowledgements I owe a great deal to colleagues, friends and family. First, my thesis supervisor, Professor Matthijs Bogaards, deserves a special gratitude for his advice and support. Over the course of my PhD work, he guided me through the research process and provided invaluable feedback. His suggestions helped make the final version of this dissertation a more coherent piece of work. His own scholarship has provided an intellectually stimulating example. I would also like to thank Dr. Marco Verweij and Dr. Heiko Pleines for agreeing to be part of my dissertation committee. A graduate colloquium convened at the Research Centre for East European Studies (FSO) of the University of Bremen brought together a group of PhD fellows – Alla, Eduard, Katerina, Lusine, Nozima, Inna, Saipira, Vera – and served as a small, but vibrant, community for intellectual exchange. There, I first presented an early draft of my survival analysis and received helpful comments. An earlier version of my Azerbaijan case study was presented at a conference around a book project on the Caspian oil boom held at the FSO in December 2010. I would like to thank Dr. Heiko Pleines, Dr. Andreas Heinrich and Dr. Andreas Heinemann-Grüder for the engaging discussion and detailed comments.
I had the opportunity to discuss my project with Prof. Andreas Schedler during his visit to Jacobs University in November 2011 and benefitted from his generous comments. An earlier draft of the Cameroon case study was presented at the workshop on Electoral Authoritarianism and Democratization in Africa organized by Prof. Bogaards and Dr. Sebastian Elischer at the Leuphana University Lüneburg, November 2013.
At various stages, my doctoral study was partially supported by funding from the OSI Global Supplementary Grant Program and my host institution, Jacobs University.
At Jacobs University, my friends and colleagues Irina Chiaburu and Julia Kusznir provided encouragement in the final years. Irina taught me a great deal about Soviet animation and various forms of subversion during our usually long conversations, and in times of hardship offered her compassion. In Baku, I am grateful to Gursel Aliyev, Yulia Aliyeva and the entire team at the Caucasus Research Resource Center (CRRC) (an “island of academic freedom” in the country) for hosting me during the spring and summer of 2013. My Baku friends Kamil, Kanan, Turkhan and Yusif made my days in Baku more enjoyable and their first-hand experiences and insights they shared with me enriched my understanding of the intricacies of Azerbaijani politics.
My former professor at Khazar University and now colleague and close friend, Dr. Anar Ahmadov, who is now Assistant Professor at Leiden University, has been a source of inspiration and encouraged me along the way. In the most insurmountable circumstances of my life, he taught me to concentrate on what was important.
Finally, I am grateful to my family in Baku, especially my mom Elmira, for their patience and support, as well as my “Baltic” cousin Leyli for providing me with a true home away from home on occasional trips to Riga.
Portions of Chapter 1 and 4 in this dissertation draw on published research papers written by this candidate as the sole author. According to copyright agreement, the author retains the right to include the published material in his thesis, provided that acknowledgment to prior publication in the journal or book is made explicit:
iv
• Guliyev, F. “Personal Rule, Neopatrimonialism, and Regime Typologies: Integrating Dahlian and Weberian Approaches to Regime Studies”, Democratization 18: 3 (2011), 575-601. Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2011.563115
• Guliyev, F. “Political Elites in Azerbaijan”. In Andreas Heinrich and Heiko Pleines (eds.) Challenges of the Caspian Resource Boom. Domestic Elites and Policy-Making. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 117-130. Copyright Palgrave Macmillan.
• Guliyev, F. “Oil and Regime Stability in Azerbaijan”, Demokratizatsiya 21:1 (2013), 113-147. Publisher: Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, George Washington University, URL: http://essential.metapress.com/content/r2g1w8r80862kn3h/
- Farid Guliyev Bremen, November 14, 2014
v
Table of Contents
Abstract ............................................................................................................................. ii
Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................... iii List of Tables .................................................................................................................. vii
List of Figures ................................................................................................................ viii Introduction .................................................................................................................... 1
Summary of the argument ......................................................................................................... 1 The curse of natural resources .................................................................................................. 7 Why oil? .................................................................................................................................... 8 The research problem .............................................................................................................. 11 The empirical strategy and findings ........................................................................................ 13 Oil and personalism: Contribution to theory .......................................................................... 15 The plan of the Thesis ............................................................................................................. 18
Chapter 1. Excursus on Authoritarianism ................................................................. 20 1.1. Authoritarian differences ................................................................................................. 20 1.2. “New institutionalism” of authoritarianism ..................................................................... 25 1.3. Classic typology ............................................................................................................... 30 1.4. What is personalism? ....................................................................................................... 32
Chapter 2: The Curse of Petroleum Wealth .............................................................. 41 2.1. Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 41 2.2. Economic effects .............................................................................................................. 41 2.3. First generation: The rentier state theory ......................................................................... 43 2.4. Second generation: Correlational studies ......................................................................... 47
2.4.1. More oil, less democracy .......................................................................................... 47 2.4.2. Spurious relationship? Measurement issues ............................................................. 48 2.4.3. Effects on democratic transitions / authoritarian survival ........................................ 52 2.4.4. Link to modernization theory ................................................................................... 53 2.4.5. Effects on democratic consolidation / democratic survival ...................................... 54 2.4.6. Effects on regime stability ........................................................................................ 55
2.5. Third generation: Conditional theories ............................................................................ 59 2.6. Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 62
Chapter 3. Oil and Personalism: Cross-country Evidence ....................................... 66 3.1. Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 66 3.2. Hypotheses ....................................................................................................................... 67 3.3. Some empirical evidence for the oil-personalism link .................................................... 81
3.3.1. Methods and measures ............................................................................................. 81 3.3.2.Analysis ..................................................................................................................... 87 3.3.3. Survival estimates ..................................................................................................... 89
3.4 Oil, personalization and the case of scrapping term limits ............................................. 106 3.5. Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 117 3.6. Appendix: List of oil-producing states and their respective regime type ...................... 118
Chapter 4. Oil, Personalism and Regime Stability in Azerbaijan .......................... 120 4.1. Introduction .................................................................................................................... 120 4.2. Perspectives on Azerbaijani elites and politics .............................................................. 122 4.3. Evidence ......................................................................................................................... 123
4.3.1. Power concentration ............................................................................................... 123
vi
4.3.2. Public administration, patron-client networks and patronage possibilities ............ 124 4.4. Elite Composition .......................................................................................................... 126 4.5. The oil economy and rent capturing .............................................................................. 128
4.5.1. Oil and the economy ............................................................................................... 128 4.6. Threats to regime stability ............................................................................................. 133
4.6.1. Intra-elite threats ..................................................................................................... 133 4.6.2. Societal opposition ................................................................................................. 136
4.7. Continuity and coherence .............................................................................................. 138 4.8. Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 140
Chapter 5. Oil, Personalism and Regime dynamics in Cameroon ......................... 144 5.1. Background .................................................................................................................... 144
5.1.2. Introduction ............................................................................................................ 144 5.1.3. Regimes in oil-rich African states .......................................................................... 144 5.1.4. The oil-personal rule link ....................................................................................... 148
5.2. Cameroon case study ..................................................................................................... 148 5.2.1. Introduction ............................................................................................................ 148 5.2.2. Pre-oil context: Authoritarian state-building under Ahidjo .................................... 151 5.2.3. Biya’s rule (up to the early 1990s) ......................................................................... 154
5.3. The economic and political effects of the oil boom ....................................................... 156 5.4. The economic crisis and political liberalization ............................................................ 161 5.5. Biya’s post-crisis survivability ...................................................................................... 165 5.6. Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 167
Chapter 6. Oil, Personalism and Regime Dynamics in Venezuela ......................... 169 6.1. Introduction .................................................................................................................... 169 6.2. Historical background .................................................................................................... 169
6.2.1. Before the Punto Fijo pact ...................................................................................... 169 6.2.2. Punto Fijo and the crisis of democracy .................................................................. 171
6.3. Chávez: Oil and regime consolidation ........................................................................... 175 6.3.1. Oil dependence ....................................................................................................... 175
6.4. Strategies of personalization .......................................................................................... 177 6.4.1. Constitutional changes ............................................................................................ 177 6.4.2. Delegative tendencies ............................................................................................. 178 6.4.3. Subordination of PDVSA to presidency and changes in oil governance ............... 179 6.4.4. Rolling back on decentralization reforms and recentralization .............................. 181 6.4.5. Social programs and clientelism ............................................................................. 182 6.4.6. Elite recruitment, institutional packing .................................................................. 185 6.4.7. Electoral competition .............................................................................................. 185 6.4.8. Personalism and the risks of diversification ........................................................... 188
6.5. Populism ........................................................................................................................ 189 6.6. The role of the military .................................................................................................. 189 6.7. Corruption and mismanagement .................................................................................... 191 6.8. Political movement, not a party ..................................................................................... 191 6.9. Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 192
Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 194 References .................................................................................................................... 197
vii
List of Tables 0.1. Oil rents as percentage of GDP, 2012 1.1. Classic and new approaches to the study of authoritarian regimes 1.2. Paradigmatic cases of personal rule 2.1. Three generations of political research on the “resource curse” 2.2. Oil and regime stability: Summary of causal mechanisms 3.1. Durability of different types of authoritarian regimes 3.2. Predicted impact of oil and the type of authoritarianism 3.3. Duration of regimes by oil 3.4. Distribution of regimes within oil- and non-oil states 3.5. Spread of regime types across oil- and non-states 3.6. Regime failures in oil- and non-oil states 3.7. Number of regime failures by oil in different regimes 3.8. Number of democratic transitions by oil in different regimes 3.9. Number of democratic transitions among oil-rich authoritarian regimes by regime type 3.10. “Pure” personalist regimes in oil states that have been “immune” to democratization 3.11. Democratic transitions in oil-rich states 3.12. Democratic regimes in oil states 3.13. Survival analysis results summarized: effect of oil on regime outcomes 3.14. Oil production years and type of authoritarianism 3.15. Executive constraints in oil-rich personalist and party-based regimes 3.16. Executive constraints and the 2004 oil boom 4.1. Share of public sector employment in total employment in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia 4.2. Size of the public sector in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia 4.3. The composition of the Azerbaijani elite, circa 2009-10 4.4. GDP per capita in Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia 4.5. Public finances in Azerbaijan 4.6. State Oil Fund (SOFAZ) assets and transfers to the state budget 5.1. Oil production in the Gulf of Guinea states 5.2. Political regimes in the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea states 5.3. Geddes regime coding of the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea states 5.4. Cameroon - Oil revenue as percentage of government revenue 5.5. Cameroon - government revenue, oil revenue, and government expenditure 5.6. Parliamentary election results for Cameroon
viii
List of Figures 0.1. Theoretical model: Oil, authoritarian structure and regime outcomes 3.1. A model of democratic and autocratic transitions 3.2. Kaplan-Meier Survival estimates by oil 3.3. Kaplan-Meier Survival Estimates for oil and non-oil producers by regime type 3.4. Kaplan-Meier Survival Estimates (event of interest: democratic transition) 3.5. Kaplan-Meier Survival Estimates with data split into personalist and non-personalist regimes (event of interest: democratic transition) 4.1. Azerbaijan: Crude oil production, 1980-2010 4.2. Azerbaijan: Petroleum income per capita in US dollars 5.1. Oil production in Cameroon 5.2. Cameroon: Petroleum income per capita in US dollars 5.3. Venezuela: Petroleum income per capita in US dollars
1
Introduction
Summary of the argument
A growing literature in comparative politics has examined the pernicious effects of oil
on democracy (Ross 2014).1 A large number of studies show that states that rely on oil
rents for their existence exhibit an apparent “paradox of plenty” (Karl 1997): oil is
associated with poor economic performance (Sachs and Warner 1995) and civil war
(Ross 2004a, 2006). More strikingly, however, oil states tend to suffer from a
democracy deficit (Ross 2001; 2012), commonly known as the “political resource
curse” (Morrison 2007).2 While statistical evidence for the “oil hinders democracy”
claim is abound, the causal links, processes and mechanisms underpinning the resource
curse as well as conditions that turn resource wealth into a curse remain under-specified
and insufficiently understood.3 A considerable portion of scholarship on the resource
curse largely relies on correlations and large-N analysis and has paid insufficient
attention to context and the causal mechanisms4 (Heinrich 2011) and to what Linz and
Stepan (1996) call “the institutional composition of authoritarian rule”.
In this study, I focus on variation in authoritarian power structure – especially
the distinction between party-institutionalized and military types of rule and personal
rule – to demonstrate that among authoritarian regime types, personalist regimes5 suffer
more severely from the political resource curse.6 In fact, as the present analysis shows,
oil-supported personalist regimes never made a transition to democracy. Using case
studies, I demonstrate that the reason for this regularity of democratization “blockage”
in the personalist sub-set of authoritarianism is that oil perpetuates and fuels
personalism in autocracies and failing democracies and does so to a much greater extent
than previously recognized. There are several ways in which personalism facilitates and 1 “Oil” refers to oil and natural gas (Ross 2012). 2 Morrison (2007) suggests the term “political resource curse” to refer to oil’s anti-democratic effects. Dunning (2008) coined the term “authoritarian resource curse”. I use both terms interchangeably. 3 The term “democracy” is used in the procedural terms to refer to a type of political regime in which government is chosen through regular, competitive elections with inclusive suffrage and in which fundamental civil liberties are respected (Dahl 1971; Diamond 1999). Authoritarianism refers to political regimes that do not meet the criteria of the expanded procedural minimum (Collier and Levitsky 1997). 4 Broadly speaking, causal mechanisms are understood as “links between inputs (independent variables) and outcomes (dependent variables)” which “tell us how things happen” (Falleti and Lynch 2009, 1146-1147). 5 For simplicity, I use the term “personalist regime” to refer to “personalist authoritarian regime”. 6 The terms “authoritarian regime”, “autocracy” and “dictatorship” refer to nondemocratic regimes and are used interchangeably throughout this study (Gandhi and Przeworski 2007).
2
amplifies oil’s democracy-dampening effects. First, personalism provides a more
favorable political-institutional setting for power concentration and a more conducive
environment for rent-seeking, elite-level corruption, patronage, and other strategies of
authoritarian cooptation. Oil supplies resources necessary to fund these transactions.
Second, personalist (sultanistic) rulers destroy independent centers of power and
opposition to a greater extent than their counterparts in military and single-party
regimes making it very difficult for regime opponents to challenge the ruling elites
(Linz and Stepan 1996). Oil makes this task of organizing and mobilizing opposition
even more arduous, if not practically unfeasible. In short, the oil-fueling-personalism
interaction presents a particularly inimical set of conditions for democratic reform to
take place.
Personalism denotes a form of state/regime (these two are thoroughly fused
under personal rule) organization in which power is concentrated in the executive, often
a strongman or supreme leader, and in which “relationships of a broadly patrimonial
type pervade political and administrative system which is formally constructed on
rational-legal lines” (Clapham 1985, 48-49; Bratton and van de Walle 1998; Geddes
1999). When all of these features are present in a regime, I refer to such a regime as
“personalist”.
The related phenomenon of personalization of state power refers to the process
by which political leaders discard pre-existing institutional constraints, concentrate
decision-making power in their hands and infuse state institutions with rules and logic
of clientelism and patrimonialism. The extreme form of personalism is called sultanism
(Chehabi and Linz 1998). In sultanistic regimes, the ruler whose decision-making
powers are “unrestrained” by ideology or legal-rational norms disregards the distinction
between the private and the public, and the rule of law is virtually absent. The “ideal-
type” sultanistic polity essentially becomes the personal domain of the ruler (Bendix
1962; Linz and Stepan 1996, 52). Because patrimonial and clientelistic structures
dominate in empirical regimes that approximate the sultanistic type, “pacted
transitions”, or any peaceful democratic change by reform for that matter, are
(unfortunately) highly unlikely in this type of regimes. The personalistic leader is likely
to be removed by a violent uprising or revolution (Huntington 1991-92). As Stepan et
al. put it succinctly in a recent analysis of Arab Uprisings, “[r]egimes with sultanistic
features – Muammar Gadhafi’s Libya or Bashar al-Assad’s Syria – have no peaceful
3
‘exit option’” (Stepan et al. 2014, 41). Backed by large amounts of discretionary funds
from oil revenues, the former Libyan leader deliberately eliminated state and
government institutions and coerced anyone manifesting opposition to his personalistic
rule (Vandewalle 1998). As the Libya expert Vandewalle pointed out, “in a sense, the
real tragedy of Libya has been that Gadhafi has very systematically destroyed whatever
institutions were in the country” (NPR 2011).
Oil helps personalist rulers to prolong their regimes’ stability by concentrating
economic resources and political power in the hands of the ruler and his support
coalition and by making peaceful democratic change structurally speaking unavailable.
As this study shows, oil fuels personalist tendencies in authoritarian regimes and might
have a similar effect in failing democracies. Introduced into the institutional setting of a
personalist autocracy, oil revenues perpetuate the arbitrary norms and clientelistic
structures that are at the core of personal rule. Oil may also contribute to the rise of
personalism in a patronage-based democracy like Venezuela under Chávez.
In party-based and military regimes, oil wealth can make it easier for an aspiring
ruler seeking to concentrate political power in his hands to achieve this goal. This often
results in the personalization of the regime. Consider the following example. During the
mid- to late-1970s, Iraq’s revenues from oil exports “skyrocketed” due to the surge in
the price of oil (Metz 1988). Amid the oil boom, Saddam Hussein was consolidating
power away from the then dominant Ba’ath Party. By 1979, on top of an oil boom,
Saddam achieved full control of the state as he officially rose to the presidency. This
event marked a
“decisive shift, already under way, from a one-party state to a personal, autocratic regime, dependent … on Saddam Hussein and his close family members and cohorts… Personal loyalty became critical. The party was weakened as an institution, and what little pluralism and balance had remained at the top disappeared. [This] personal autocracy focused on one man and his whims … and the party was reduced to an appendage” (Phebe Marr quoted in Moon 2009, 130; also see Tripp 2003).
About 60 senior members of the Ba’ath Party were purged publicly during that year
(BBC News 2013).
Existing studies of the resource curse approach the measure of the political
regime in an aggregate way as a homogenous residual category, while a more fine-
4
grained appreciation of authoritarian regime differences allows one to more accurately
assess the magnitude of oil’s effects in different political systems. It shows that oil-
fueled personalism annihilates the potential for democratic change. In the personalist
regimes with significant oil endowments, like Iraq (Birdsall and Subramanian 2004) and
Equatorial Guinea (McSherry 2006), all regime transitions, which were already less
likely and less frequent than in their non-oil personalist counterparts, historically led to
the replacement of an old autocracy with a new one. With a few provisional periods
lasting less than 3 years (as the short-lived government of Elchibey in Azerbaijan in
1992-93) and in some cases (as in Biya’s Cameroon in the early 1990s) despite strong
mass-based opposition, none of the oil-rich personalist regimes ever had a transition
leading to a lasting democracy, while a comparatively larger number of oil-rich party-
based regimes, such as Mexico and Indonesia, and the military regimes in Argentina,
Bolivia and, to a certain extent, Nigeria did democratize despite their oil. Oil-rich
monarchies were equally unlikely to experience a democratic transition although the
results in this case were not statistically significant. Oil had the effect of blocking
democratization only in personalistically-governed regimes. While other studies have
shown that oil postpones democratization in all autocracies irrespective of their regime
type (Jensen and Wantchekon 2004; Ross 2012) or that oil only affects authoritarian
durability, but not democratic transitions (Wright et al. 2012), my study shows that oil’s
effects are relevant for both outcomes and that the democracy-hindering effects of oil
are particularly pronounced in personalist dictatorships. In essence, oil-fueled
personalism made democratic transitions in such regimes non-existent. To put it
differently, while scholars hold that a political “curse” is likely to afflict all autocracies
reliant on oil equally, I argue that oil has the strongest democracy-inhibiting effect in
personalist regimes. In fact, oil is literally a curse (without the figurative quotation
marks) for this, namely personalist, kind of authoritarianism.
The main argument of this study is that oil drives the incentives for the ruler to
personalize power. Where personalism was the defining feature of the regime before
oil’s onset, oil will reinforce the personalist tendencies because of the leader’s
temptations to maximize power and because personalist dictators are facing relatively
low costs when they choose to eliminate the pre-existing constraints that restrict their
rule. Scrapping presidential term limits by many autocrats in oil-producing states, such
as Algeria, Azerbaijan, Cameroon and Venezuela, discussed in Chapter 3, provides a
5
good illustration for this tendency. Similarly, oil might have a personalizing effect on a
democracy in which previously an interaction of oil rents and patronage-based party
rule has come to be associated with public service venality and elite corruption, as was
the case in Venezuela by the early 1990s.
Personalist regimes display no tolerance of opposition and try to eliminate any
pockets of autonomous power to such an extent that transition to democracy in such
settings becomes extremely difficult (Linz and Stepan 1996). Oil enabled personalist
rulers, like Gadhafi in Libya, Saddam in Iraq and Biya in Cameroon, to concentrate
power in their hands even more which had the effect of undermining the forces of
political opposition seeking democratic change from both within the regime and from
societal opposition. As a consequence, even in times of economic crisis, as in Cameroon
in the early 1990s, when the Biya regime could not longer rely on oil as the source of
patronage and the regime was challenged by strikes and mass-based protests, the pre-
crisis policies shaped the political arena in the incumbent’s favor to such an extent that
by the time of the economic crisis the political opposition was lacking resources and
capabilities to unseat the long-lasting dictatorship of Paul Biya while the incumbent
enjoyed French financial support that substituted for the dwindling oil rents.
Similarly, in Azerbaijan, analyzed in Chapter 4, when the death of the former
president Heydar Aliyev in 2003 opened a window of opportunity for the political
opposition to challenge the regime, oil and personalism made this possibility incredibly
difficult to materialize. The monopolistic control and distribution of oil rents towards
the regime elites coupled with the organization of state power on the basis of patronage
networks during the 1990s produced a strong sense of personal allegiance to the ruling
president and deprived political opposition groups of the financial resources. This
complicated the emergence of moderate elites from within the elite and limited the
space for the development of opposition forces from society. The regime founder
constructed the “vertical of power” centered on the presidency (or the individual
occupying the chief executive office) and relied on a network of patronage groups
organized around regional identities, commonly known as “clans”. During his decade-
long rule, Aliyev consolidated the regime around a close-knit group of elites, appointed
loyalists to key state offices and eliminated any serious challenges to his rule. When oil
revenues began to increase, he used the “unearned income” to cement his strategic
alliance within a group of key regime players. Because of this patron-clientelistic
6
organization of the system of rule, presidential power was transferred from the ailing
father to his son, Ilham, without facing any visible opposition from inside the elite.
After succeeding his father in the presidency, the son Aliyev was in need to regain the
support of his father’s old guard elite (Radnitz 2012). As the father-to-son succession
(2003) almost coincided with the start of the multi-billion dollar oil boom (2003-04),
elite consolidation proceeded rather smoothly. In a short period of time, he was able to
reconfigure the regime elites around his leadership in a personalistic manner similar to
his father’s, using rewards to supporters and coercion against opponents. While the
formal political opposition parties were weakened throughout the 1990s (Sultanova
2014), by the early 2000s they were still acting as a “small constraint on the ruling
elite’s power” (Ahmadov 2011, 208). In about five years after the start of the new oil
boom era, these organizations were badly emasculated and were no longer represented
in the parliament elected in 2010 (Pearce and Guliyev, n.d). Oil money also served as a
substitute for statesmanship for the younger leader in the sense that although Ilham
Aliyev, unlike his father, lacked the skills of a Machiavellian politician, “his rule
enjoyed a constant stream of oil money, which made it easier to buy supporters and
suppress opponents” (Shirinov 2013, 2).
Rule of law and constitutionalism in Azerbaijan exist only on paper. Courts are
used as the president’s tool to punish opponents and as a mechanism of selective
repression. A recent example includes the arrest of a political opposition leader Ilgar
Mammadov who was put in jail on alleged charges of instigating riots in the provincial
town of Ismayilli in January 2013 (Amnesty International 2013), although it seems
more plausible that his arrest was meant to prevent him from running for presidency in
October 2013 (Guliyev and Pearce 2013). President Aliyev also used an oil fund, which
was set up in the early 2000s and put under the president’s exclusive control (Aslanli
2012), as the cushion against economic crisis during oil price downfalls. The state oil
company (SOCAR), too, has been under the president’s personal control and used as
“cash cow” for the government (Kjærnet 2012). As in Cameroon, the extreme
personalism of the regime (sultanism) in Azerbaijan made it exceptionally difficult for
any opposition to mount a coordinated action against the two-decade rule of the
incumbent elites. In sum, by reinforcing the personalist tendencies, oil created the least
favorable political environment for democratic change to take place.
7
The curse of natural resources
There is by now a large body of empirical research on the harmful effects of petroleum
resources on the economy and political-institutional development of oil-producing
countries. The resource curse theory has posited that mineral resources, notably oil and
natural gas, cause countries to grow slower than normal (Sachs and Warner 1995, 2001;
Auty 2001). There is also ample evidence that oil can be a hindrance to democratization
(Barro 1999; Ross 2001, 2009, 2012; Jensen and Wantchekon 2004; Ulfelder 2007;
Aslaksen 2010; Ramsay 2011; Andersen and Ross 2011; Tsui 2011; Ahmadov 2014).
Empirical tests of the “authoritarian resource curse” hypothesis have yielded a
statistically robust inverse correlation between oil and levels of democracy suggesting
that oil windfalls tend to promote authoritarian rule.
The claim that “oil promotes authoritarianism” can refer to any of the following
causal inferences: 1) irrespective of regime type in place, oil makes political regimes
less democratic; 2) oil hinders democratic transitions in already authoritarian regimes
or, in other words, oil promotes authoritarian survival; and 3) oil prevents democratic
consolidation and leads to authoritarian reversals in minimally democratic regimes.
While different studies have found empirical support for each of these claims, there is
an emerging consensus that the political resource curse thesis refers only to the second
link, namely, situations in which oil hinders democratic transitions in existing
autocracies (Ross 2014). If oil inhibits democratic transitions in existing autocracies, it
is reasonable to ask if these effects vary with the institutional composition of the
authoritarian regime in place.
In the aftermath of World War II, an overwhelming majority of oil states (with a
notable exception of Latin America) had authoritarian regimes. Due to a high
concentration of oil wealth in the state rather than the private sector after the wave of oil
nationalizations took place in the 1960-70s (Kobrin 1985; Ross 2012), authoritarian
rulers used oil rents to perpetuate their stay in power. The availability of oil revenues
helped authoritarian regimes to survive and avoid democratization even in spite of
growing external and internal pressures to democratize associated with the third wave of
democratization from the mid-1970s onwards (Huntington 1991). Some oil states, such
as Nigeria, Congo, Algeria and Azerbaijan, made attempts – albeit unsuccessfully – to
initiate democratic change. A few of these states, notably Indonesia in 1998 and Mexico
in 2000, eventually managed to transition to democracy. However, everywhere, except
8
Latin America (Dunning 2008), oil rents promoted authoritarianism and prevented
democratization. Alongside quantitative support for the authoritarian resource curse,
case studies drawn from individual country experiences documented the negative
political effects of oil windfalls. The notion of the resource curse has become a
conventional wisdom among pundits and journalists. The New York Times columnist
Thomas Friedman (2006, n.p.) went so far as to formulate “the first law of
petropolitics”, according to which “the price of oil and the pace of freedom always
move in opposite directions in oil-rich petrolist states”.
Why oil?
Oil has several unusual properties which are thought to be responsible for certain
political outcomes. First, compared to other natural resources, oil exports generate more
profit rents for the state (Karl 1997, 238; Collier 2007, 43). Rents are the excess of
revenues from oil over all costs associated with its extraction and production. Not all
resources produce such excess profits that have the power to transform the state into a
“rentier state” (Dunning 2008, 39-42; Dunning 2009, 5). Because of the amount of rents
oil exports generate, the receipt of oil windfalls by governments is often compared to
the effect of “manna falling from heaven” (Karl 1997). According to Karl (1997), oil
windfall revenues tend to induce rent-seeking activities by politicians and bureaucrats
competing to capture a share of the “oil pie”. In the context of weak governance and
unrestrained fiscal process that characterize many states in the developing world, such
rent-seeking can have dire consequences for economic growth and the development of
state bureaucratic institutions.
Second, oil belongs to the type of spatially concentrated or “point-source”
resources whose production is capital intensive and requires large sunk costs. The
opposite of point-source resources is “diffuse” resources (such as agricultural produce,
forestry, and fisheries as well as certain types of mineral resources, such as alluvial
diamonds). These are normally extracted by private actors and do not necessarily
generate large amounts of rents for the state (Auty 2001; Le Billon 2001; Dunning
2009).
Finally, oil fiscal revenues are vulnerable to high fiscal volatility due to frequent
fluctuations in the world oil price (e.g. Gelb and associates 1988), as the current oil
price fall demonstrates. Because of unpredictability and volatility of their oil revenue,
9
oil states are exposed to severe negative supply shocks (Dunning 2005; Smith 2007)
raising the risks of long-term fiscal sustainability. As Barnett and Ossowski (2002, 3)
put it, “[t]he unique fiscal challenges for an oil-producing country stem from the fact
that oil revenue is exhaustible, volatile, and uncertain, and largely originates from
abroad.”
Table 0.1. Oil rents as percentage of GDP, 2012 From highest to lowest
Countries Oil rents as % of GDP
Countries
Oil rents as % of GDP
Congo, Rep. (Brz) 71.0
Lithuania 0.2
Kuwait 53.8
Italy 0.2 Libya 52.3
Mozambique 0.1
Equatorial Guinea 51.4
Austria 0.1 Saudi Arabia 45.8
Moldova 0.1
Iraq 45.5
Netherlands 0.1 Gabon 44.1
Poland 0.1
Angola 42.1
Chile 0.1 Oman 37.2
Czech Republic 0.0
Azerbaijan 35.8
Germany 0.0 Venezuela 26.7
Bulgaria 0.0
Chad 26.4
Greece 0.0 Brunei Darussalam 25.1
France 0.0
Kazakhstan 24.9
Slovak Republic 0.0 Iran 22.0
Morocco 0.0
United Arab Emirates 21.9
Spain 0.0 Turkmenistan 20.6
Israel 0.0
Bahrain 19.4
Japan 0.0 Ecuador 19.1
Jordan 0.0
Algeria 17.1
Korea, Rep. 0.0 Nigeria 15.3
Armenia 0.0
Yemen 14.5
Belgium 0.0 Russian Federation 13.9
Benin 0.0
Qatar 12.1
Bangladesh 0.0 Trinidad and Tobago 11.0
Bosnia and Herzegovina 0.0
Norway 9.4
Botswana 0.0 Colombia 8.0
Switzerland 0.0
Egypt 8.0
Costa Rica 0.0 Cameroon 8.0
Cyprus 0.0
Vietnam 7.6
Dominican Republic 0.0 Mexico 6.8
Eritrea 0.0
Malaysia 6.0
Estonia 0.0 Ghana 5.5
Ethiopia 0.0
10
Bolivia 5.4
Finland 0.0 Sudan 4.9
Hong Kong 0.0
Albania 4.7
Honduras 0.0 Tunisia 4.4
Haiti 0.0
Cote d'Ivoire 4.1
Ireland 0.0 Uzbekistan 3.4
Iceland 0.0
Canada 3.2
Jamaica 0.0 Argentina 2.9
Kenya 0.0
Brazil 2.7
Cambodia 0.0 Indonesia 2.6
Kosovo 0.0
Congo, Dem. Rep. 2.6
Lebanon 0.0 Thailand 2.2
Sri Lanka 0.0
Mongolia 2.1
Luxembourg 0.0 Denmark 2.0
Latvia 0.0
Peru 1.6
Macedonia, FYR 0.0 Belarus 1.5
Malta 0.0
Serbia 1.5
Montenegro 0.0 China 1.4
Namibia 0.0
Romania 1.4
Nicaragua 0.0 India 1.2
Nepal 0.0
United Kingdom 1.0
Panama 0.0 United States 0.9
Portugal 0.0
Pakistan 0.9
Paraguay 0.0 Australia 0.8
Senegal 0.0
Ukraine 0.8
Singapore 0.0 Kyrgyz Republic 0.7
El Salvador 0.0
New Zealand 0.7
Slovenia 0.0 Guatemala 0.7
Sweden 0.0
Croatia 0.5
Togo 0.0 Hungary 0.3
Tanzania 0.0
Tajikistan 0.2
Uruguay 0.0 Philippines 0.2
South Africa 0.0
Turkey 0.2
Zambia 0.0 Georgia 0.2
Zimbabwe 0.0
Source: World Bank, Development Indicators, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PETR.RT.ZS Note: Oil rents as a percentage of GDP measure the difference between the value of crude oil production at world prices and total costs of production. A country may be considered highly resource dependent when oil rents account for at least 5 percent of its GDP (van der Ploeg 2010). These cases are marked in bold in the table.
Moreover, analysts often distinguish between oil wealth (or abundance) and
dependence on oil wealth. Resource dependence indicates that oil rents account for a
significant part of government fiscal revenue. Highly resource-reliant states are often
called the rentier states. Countries such as the U.S. and Canada are abundant in oil and
gas resources, but since they possess a highly diversified structure of the economy,
11
these states are not dependent on oil. In contrast, in countries like the Republic of
Congo (Brazzaville), Kuwait and Libya oil rents can account for as much as half of the
country’s GDP (see Table 0.1) and supply most of government revenues in those
countries.
Finally, economists distinguish between “low-absorbing” and “high-absorbing”
oil exporters (Gelb 1988; Auty 1990). Low-absorbers are economies with small non-oil
sectors with restricted capacity to absorb oil windfalls that accrue to the state coffers.
Examples include Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, and Bahrain. In contrast, high-absorbers
have more diversified economies allowing them to deploy larger capital inflows (Auty
1990, 95). Examples of high-absorbing countries are Malaysia, Indonesia, Nigeria, and
Cameroon. Similarly, Karl (1997, 17-19) uses the terms “capital-deficient oil exporters”
(which corresponds to the “high-absorber” category) and “capital surplus countries”
(which corresponds to the “low-absorber” category) to capture the difference in per
capita oil reserves and absorption capacity.
In sum, the oil curse is a phenomenon that most scholars expect to strike those
states that live off the large amounts of rents generated by oil exports.
The research problem
As noted above, the most credible interpretation of the political resource curse
phenomenon is one that emphasizes the ways in which oil reduces the probability of
authoritarian states to democratize (Ulfelder 2007; Andersen and Ross 2011; Wiens et
al. 2014). Luciani (1994, 134), for example, pointed out that “[authoritarian] states that
do not face a fiscal crisis and enjoy continuing access to exogenous rent will be able to
postpone democratization indefinitely”. In this view, authoritarian survival is held as the
dependent variable.
However, despite strong evidence supporting the negative effect of oil on
democratization, a number of problems remain. First, studies have overwhelmingly
focused on an average rather than ultimate effect of oil on the political regime
(Ahmadov 2014). Second, contextual conditions and causal mechanisms connecting the
two variables of interest remain insufficiently explored, and authoritarian regimes are
largely treated as a homogenous category. As Basedau (2005, 9) pointed out, “nobody
would argue that the [resource] ‘curse’ strikes over night once resource extraction or
production has begun. There are certain transmission channels or causal mechanisms
12
that might turn resources into problems”. Third, it is not clear how oil interacts with
relevant regime-related and other political institutions and within different political
contexts. And, finally, the fact that oil had no authoritarian effects in Latin America
appears to be an empirical anomaly, prompting Dunning (2008) to develop a conditional
theory to account for the Latin American exception.
What do we know about the causal links underlying the resource curse? While
scholars identified a number of causal paths, there seems to be little consensus on what
causal mechanisms are more important and whether a general causal mechanism-based
theory of the oil curse is possible at all. Low levels of taxation and fiscal autonomy of
the state (the “rentier state” literature), investments in repressive apparatuses (Ross
2001; Bellin 2004), increased public spending (Beblawi and Luciani 1987; Luciani
1994), patronage (Robinson et al. 2006), rent-seeking (Karl 1997), corruption (Fish
2005), state ownership of oil (Jones Luong and Weinthal 2006, 2010), expansion of the
state (Ross 2008), strong party and state institutions preceding oil production (Smith
2006, 2007), incumbency advantage and discretion over rent distribution (Wantchekon
2002; Jensen and Wantchekon 2004), each has been identified as a crucial intermediate
variable connecting oil rents to either democratic regression or persistent
authoritarianism as an outcome variable. However, it remains unclear which of these
mechanisms (or their combination) are more important and in which authoritarian
regimes. Most evidence on the causal mechanisms is based on single-case studies and
their generalizability (external validity) is rarely tested in cross-national analysis.
One of the most salient distinctions in the literature on authoritarian regimes has
been a distinction between personalist autocracies and other, more (formally)
institutionalized, forms (Geddes 1999) with important empirical implications for
different outcomes, such as economic development, corruption, war, and regime
transitions (This literature is reviewed in Chapter 1). However, this crucial analytical
distinction between types of authoritarian rule have been somewhat neglected in the
existing resource curse literature.
My study aims to address the following research question: Is oil equally harmful
for the survival and democratization of personalist and other kinds of authoritarian
rule? To put it differently, are personalist regimes more likely to suffer from an oil
curse?
13
Rather than measuring the average effect of oil on levels of democracy that has
proven to be sensitive to the choice of measurement for both oil and the political regime
(Ahmadov 2014), this study starts with the assumption that the effects of oil might vary
predictably with the type of regime in place and that the interaction between oil and
authoritarian institutions might influence the durability of regimes and their probability
to democratize. Estimating the survival likelihood of different regime types confirms
this expectation and points to the tendency of personalist regimes to avoid democratic
transitions altogether. In order to explore the workings of the oil-personalism link at a
less macro level, I present three case studies. Using the logic of process-tracing (George
and Bennett 2005; Bennett and Elman 2006; Gerring 2007), I examine the causal
processes through which oil fuels and perpetuates personalism in authoritarian regimes
and failing democracies by analyzing three regimes: Azerbaijan, Cameroon and
Venezuela.
The empirical strategy and findings
The research design is informed by a mixed-method methodology that combines
quantitative analysis with case studies. In the nested-analysis approach, the researcher
starts with a large-N analysis and select cases based on the robustness of large-N results.
Since my results of the analysis of broader patterns are sufficiently convincing to
support the hypothesized relationship, cases were chosen for model-testing rather than
model-building (Lieberman 2005). Therefore, the selected cases represent ‘typical case
study’. According to Seawright and Gerring (2008, 299), “because the typical case is
well explained by an existing model, the puzzle of interest to the researcher lies within
that case.” A typical case is chosen to look more in depth into the workings of causal
processes and mechanisms.
In addition to nested analysis, my case selection follows the most-different
systems design (Przeworski and Teune 1970; Gerring 2007). The cases are different on
all variables except for two variables of interest: the key independent variables (oil
wealth and personalism) and the outcome variable (regime stability and
democratization). Causal processes represent the mutually-reinforcing interaction
between oil and personalism that blocks democratization in the otherwise very different
societal and cultural settings.
14
My theoretical model draws on theories of authoritarian politics (Linz and
Stepan 1996; Bratton and van de Walle 1997; Geddes 1999) that highlight systematic
differences in the institutional arrangements, logics and strategies of political survival
characterizing different kinds of authoritarian regimes. To capture the qualitative
differences between formal and informal institutional characteristics of authoritarian
regime, I relied on Geddes’ coding of authoritarian regimes available as a dataset
(Geddes et al. 2014). Geddes’ (1999) original conceptualization of authoritarianism
differentiated between categories of military, single-party, personalist autocracies, and
their hybrids, and now also includes monarchies. Some scholars defined personal rule as
a residual category (Ezrow and Frantz 2011) or shed it from regime typologies
(Hadenius and Teorell 2007). Unlike them, I treat personalist authoritarian rule as a
political regime type on its own or as an important dimension of the political regime. I
recognize, however, that for some research purposes it can be more helpful to think of
personalism (or sultanism) as a matter of degree, or as Stepan and Linz (2013, 26)
explain:
“[r]egimes can be almost entirely sultanistic in their characteristics or have some, but not many, sultanistic characteristics. It is useful to view sultanism as a continuum, for whether a regime is more or less sultanistic will affect the potential range of transitions away from sultanism that are open to it.”
Furthermore, personalism can be seen as both a systemic feature and a strategy
in the ruler’s hands. As a system, personalist regimes are characterized by high degree
of concentration and centralization of power in the executive (single-man leadership),
neopatrimonial public administration, and the instrumental use of the patron-client
network. Akech (2011) regards personalism as a deliberately chosen, institutionally
designed, legally justified strategy pursued by the ruler to maintain control of the state
apparatus and to keep the regime running. Following Schedler (2011), three types of
threats to dictatorial rule can be singled out: lateral, vertical, and external threats. As a
deliberate strategy to deter potential regime opponents, personal rule can be effective at
preventing both lateral (elite coups) and vertical threats (elections, rebellion)
authoritarian rulers face. External threats (sanctions and war) rarely apply to oil-based
autocracies as they usually enjoy support of Western powers interested in securing
stable supply of strategically important energy resources (Bellin 2004).
15
My primary goal was to explore the effects of oil on the risk and outcome of
regime breakdown and subsequent regime change across authoritarian regime types.
Following Gleditsch and Choung (2004) and Wright et al. (2012), I distinguish between
two types of regime change following the collapse of an authoritarian regime: autocratic
transitions and democratic transitions. Survival probabilities were estimated for each
outcome separately. The analysis of survival probabilities of different types of regimes
with and without oil in a dataset covering all political regimes that existed in the period
between 1950-2010 demonstrates that although oil has a largely positive effect on
authoritarian durability of both party-based and personalist regimes (but not military
regimes), it has a particularly strong negative effect on the democratization chances of
personalist autocracies. In fact, not a single personalist regime that had oil ever
democratized in the last half a century, which suggests that oil tends to impede
democratic transitions in personalist autocracies to a greater extent than in other kinds
of authoritarian regimes. In other words, personalist autocracies that have access to oil
are very unlikely candidates for democratization compared to personalist regimes
without oil and other types of autocracies.
Oil and personalism: Contribution to theory
Previous studies by Smith (2004; 2006; 2007) demonstrated a positive influence of oil
on the stability of regimes, irrespective of the regime type. Smith (2007) showed that oil
makes regimes more, not less, durable. His findings challenge the “weak state”
argument of the rentier state theory maintaining that through various perverse effects oil
rents produce “weak states” that lack capacity to withstand fiscal crises. The “weak
state” thesis (Karl 1997) argued that because of their shallow institutions oil-based
regimes will survive only for as long as they can enjoy the continuing supply of
revenues; in times of boom and bust crises, petro-states were expected to fall.
A study by Wright (2008) found that countries with larger oil reserves are more
likely to be personalist autocracies which implies that “if natural resource dependence
impedes democratization [as the “political resource curse” theory argues], then this may
be because natural resource dependence breeds personalist authoritarian rule, but not
necessarily other forms of authoritarian rule” (Wright 2008, 325).
Smith (2007) linked the durability of oil regimes to the strength of dominant
parties. The oil-producing regimes with strong governing parties include such cases as
16
Angola, Malaysia, Mexico, and Tunisia. In most of these cases, however, ruling parties
were established before oil and often in the environments of high levels of societal
opposition to the governing elites (Dunning 2005; Smith 2007). Revolutionary regimes
and regimes emerging out of violent struggles tend to have strong parties and are
notorious for their remarkable stability (Huntington 1970; Levitsky and Way 2013).
None of the oil-rich personalist regimes transformed into an institutionalized party-
based regime after the oil boom which suggests that if a regime never built a strong
political party before oil it never created one after the arrival of oil revenues.
By contrast, some oil-producing regimes that initially were based on
institutionalized form authoritarian rule (a strong hegemonic party or the military) were
later transformed into a more personalistic regime. Apart from the example of Saddam’s
consolidation of power during the oil boom in the late 1970s discussed above,
additional examples include Cameroon after Ahidjo handed power over to Biya in 1982
and Congo-Brazzaville after Sassou Nguesso’s comeback to power in 1997. In
Cameroon, analyzed in detail in Chapter 5, Paul Biya asserted rule and weakened the
power of the ruling party Cameroon National Union in 1982 and this maximization and
centralization of power in the executive was assisted considerably by the revenues from
the oil boom from the late 1970s to mid-1980s. In the Republic of Congo, Sassou
Nguesso’s return to power in 1997 marked the end of the country’s short-lived
democratic government. A single party-based regime dominated by the Congolese
Workers Party (PCT) in tandem with the military was replaced with a new regime based
on Sassou Nguesso’s personal domination. Angola seems to have been following in the
same direction as President Dos Santos has been consolidating power in his own hands
since at least the late 1980s in the environment in which it became increasingly difficult
for the ruling MPLA to retain Marxist-Leninist ideology (Hodges 2004; de Morais
2011) although this subtle change has so far been limited to the leadership level. As
these examples suggest, oil windfalls tended to promote the personalization of
authoritarian rule in a number of cases.
Yet, despite the tendencies described above, the relationship between oil and
personal rule has been neglected by scholars of the resource curse. Explanations for the
viability of personal rule in oil-exporting states rarely go beyond simplistic accounts in
which personal rule or neopatrimonialism is presented as a temporary and amorphous
form of rule (typically used as synonymous with “state weakness”) without viable basis
17
for survival. While personalist regimes that lacked access to oil wealth could be
described as prone to instability, this does not apply to their counterparts “blessed” with
oil. Many oil-producing personalist regimes, such as Iraq, Libya, and Cameroon,
survived the fiscal crises of the 1980s and other “bad times” and successfully resisted
democratization without falling victim to crashing oil prices. Gadhafi’s regime
collapsed in 2011 only after the military intervention by NATO. It seems unlikely that
the Gadhafi regime would have survived without NATO’s intervention “as the military
capabilities of the opposition were too weak to prevail against the forces of the regime”
(Beck and Hüser 2012, 14).
Ruling parties, often conceived as the primary tools of maintaining stability, are
not the only institutions that can link resource rents and authoritarian survival.
Centralized executives, neopatrimonial state bureaucracies and patronage networks can
also foster authoritarian persistence and make democratic reform especially difficult.
Oil revenues can be used to centralize even more power in the executive and remove
constraints that previously tied hands of the chief executive. They provide the resources
needed for maintaining the neopatrimonial apparatus by creating more opportunities,
such as public sector jobs, contracts, subsidies for friends, family members and cronies.
In this way, oil revenues help to “feed” the patronage network. By helping to sustain
and perpetuate all these tendencies, oil rents make mounting opposition from within the
regime and from society especially difficult. It can therefor be argued that the
democratization blockage in personalist autocracies can be explained by the symbiotic
link (or “elective affinity”) between oil and personalism.
As other authoritarian regimes with lots of oil, personalist autocracies can use oil
rents to “translate money into power”, namely buy loyalty of their supporters (Wintrobe
1998), intra-elite oppositionists, and potential rebels. As Fjelde (2009, 200) noted:
“oil wealth provides the economic base for a personal rule where elites attract political loyalty through the use of private economic inducements. Strategies of ‘sharing the spoils’ from the oil through off-budget and selective accommodation of private interests are likely to reduce the economic incentives to displace the government among would-be rebels”.
With a few notable exceptions (e.g. Smith 2005, 2007; Gandhi and Przeworski 2006),
the insights from the resource curse research and institutional perspectives on
18
authoritarian regimes have seldom been synthesized to examine the influence of oil on
regime outcomes of interest. In this study, I integrated the insights from the institutional
and political economy perspectives to study the role and influence of (authoritarian)
political institutions in the political resource curse.
Research on the political dimension of natural resources has largely overlooked
theoretical and empirical work on the “new institutionalism of authoritarianism”. First,
scholars of the resource curse expect the effects of oil rents on authoritarian survival to
be similar across regime types. Second, they ignore the extent to which the type of
authoritarianism affects which paths of regime transitions are available. The theoretical
model I develop in this study (Figure 0.1) incorporates the insights from both
perspectives. This study aims to examine the implications of this alternative theoretical
model. More specifically, drawing on the analytical approach developed by Geddes
(1999) as well as the new institutionalism of authoritarianism, I derived several
hypotheses about possible causal connections between oil and the type of
authoritarianism and their possible effects on the two outcomes of interest: authoritarian
failure and democratic transitions.
The plan of the Thesis
The study is divided into an introduction, two parts, and a conclusion. Part I reviews the
literature and presents empirical analysis of data on regime changes. Reviews of
literature on authoritarianism and the resource curse serves two purposes. On the one
had, it aims to use this literature review to develop hypotheses about the possible links
between oil and personalist and other types of authoritarian rule. On the other hand, the
purpose is to try to bridge the gap between the two research strands. The analysis
provides descriptive statistics and estimates survival probabilities to assess the effects of
oil on the regime durability and democratic transitions across different types of
authoritarianism. Part II consists of three case studies chosen to illustrate the
relationship between oil, personalism and regime outcomes. Each case provides a
detailed background to the domestic politics of each country, focusing on the processes
of executive power concentration, presidents’ personal control of national oil companies
and oil funds, and the use of oil revenues for often short-term political purposes.
19
Figure 0.1. Theoretical model: Oil, authoritarian structure and regime outcomes
Source: author
Each case also looks at the changes in the oil production and income levels, how
these changes affect personalist tendencies in the respective regimes and their
implications for regime developments. The conclusion summarizes the findings and
reflects on broader implications for theory development and future research.
Institutional composition of authoritarianism
(military, single party, personal, monarchy)
Oil wealth
Authoritarian durability
Democratic transition
20
Chapter 1. Excursus on Authoritarianism
1.1. Authoritarian differences There is a long tradition of scholarship on nondemocratic regimes spanning from classic
works by Arendt 1973 [1951], and Friedrich and Brzezinski (1956) on totalitarianism to
a more recent generation of research (see Brooker 2000, 2008; Ezrow and Frantz 2011)
(see Table 1.1). From empires and kingdoms of the past to dictatorships of today,
human history is a history of authoritarian regimes. By the onset of the third wave of
democratization (Huntington 1991) in 1974, there were only thirty-nine democracies in
the world constituting 27 percent of all independent states (Diamond 1999, 24). By the
late 1990s, 85 authoritarian regimes fell (Geddes 1999, 115) and about 117 states were
democracies (Diamond 1999, 24-25). Democracies represented 60 percent of all
sovereign states of the world. In the year 2011, the total number of electoral
democracies remained unchanged (Freedom House 2012). Therefore, about 40 percent
of all countries today are autocracies and taking into account the population size of
China and Russia, two “authoritarian great powers” (Gat 2007), the vast majority of
people today live under authoritarian rule of some kind.
Despite the unprecedented expansion of democracy in the last quarter of the
twentieth century, some regimes such as those in China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and
Morocco have been remarkably stable. In the Chinese case, Nathan (2003) notes that
“authoritarian resilience” is linked to higher levels of political institutionalization
achieved by the Chinese Communist Party. Other authoritarian regimes proved to be
less resilient. Many of those that collapsed did not transit to democracy. In fact, thirty-
four regime transitions during the so-called third wave resulted in the replacement of
old authoritarian regimes with new ones (Geddes 1999, 116). Other authoritarian
regimes opened up but later relapsed to authoritarianism. In post-Soviet countries, the
demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 triggered political liberalization in the new states. In
most of them, however, old communist regimes were replaced by various forms of
(electoral) authoritarian regimes (Ekiert et al. 2007). In Sub-Saharan Africa, most states
introduced some form of competitive elections, but in fact only a handful of Africa’s
“multiparty electoral regimes” evolved into stable liberal democracies (Bratton and van
de Walle 1997; Van de Walle 2002) while the majority of competitive regimes have
dominant party systems (Bogaards 2004).
21
Considering historical developments outlined above, since the early 2000s
researchers have begun to talk about the end of the third wave of democratization and
the onset of worldwide democratic stagnation. Carothers (2002) famously proclaimed
the end of the “transition paradigm” that was supposed to explain the processes and
outcomes of third wave transitions. Since the new regimes did not seem to fit standard
typologies of political regimes, new regime categories and conceptual inventories were
created, and scholars have been encouraged to study these new forms of regimes as
“hybrid” or “semi-authoritarian” regimes (Diamond 2002; Ottaway 2003). Recently,
Diamond (2008) warned that a new wave of democratic recession has given rise to
predatory states. In its annual report, Freedom House (2010) noted that the previous few
years represented one of the longest uninterrupted periods of democratic deterioration.
The Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2010 (a) Democracy Index appeared with the telling
subtitle “Democracy in Retreat” (for less pessimistic views, see Carothers 2009, Merkel
2010). While a large protest in December 2010 in Tunisia sparked a wave of uprisings
across the Arab world ousting the long-surviving autocratic rulers in Egypt, Libya and
Yemen, the outcomes of these protests remain uncertain.
In reaction to the putative global democratic recession and authoritarian
resilience, the problem of authoritarianism has received the renewed attention by
scholars of political regimes (Ezrow and Frantz 2011). Some of the questions being
raised include the following: What can explain the resilience of some authoritarian
regimes in the current era of democracy? Why are some authoritarian regimes robust
and durable while others are fragile and short-lived?
Having lived through and personally experienced the regime of Franco in Spain,
Linz noticed the stark contrast between the Franco regime and the totalitarian model
prevailing at that time. Based on this observation, Linz (1964; 1975; 2000) introduced a
distinction between totalitarian and authoritarian regimes and argued that many modern
nondemocratic regimes could be better described as authoritarian. He defined an
authoritarian regime as a political system with limited pluralism, without an elaborate
ideology, without a particular mode of mobilization, in which a leader or a small group
“exercises power within formally ill-defined limits but actually quite predictable ones”
(Linz 1964, 297).
22
Table 1.1. Classic and new approaches to the study of authoritarian regimes
Main contribution
Main argument
Classic works
Totalitarianism/ Movement-regimes
Totalitarian regime is a type of a political system characterized by the fusion of an ideologically motivated political party and the state aimed at exercising total control of the society. (Arendt 1973[1951]; Friedrich and Brzezinski 1956; Tucker 1961)
Authoritarianism Authoritarian regimes are a distinctive type of nondemocratic rule based primarily on limited political pluralism. (Linz 1964, 1975, 2000; Purcell 1973; Kirkpatrick 1979)
“One-party systems”
“One-party systems” are the only viable modern form of political systems in which a single party plays a dominant role. (Huntington 1970; Huntington and Moore 1970)
Bureaucratic-authoritarian model
Under certain conditions, delayed industrialization can give rise to an exclusionary authoritarian regime governed by civil and military technocrats seeking to promote industrial development to a higher level. (O’Donnell 1973, 1979; Collier 1980; Remmer and Merx 1982; Bermeo 1995; Munck 1998)
Models of military politics
Officer corps tends to withdraw from politics once they feel that their corporate identity is threatened. (Stepan 1971; Nordlinger 1977; Remmer 1989a)
Variety of nondemocratic regimes
Authoritarian regimes differ along numerous dimensions: totalitarian vs. authoritarian vs. post-totalitarian; institutionalized vs. sultanistic. (Perlmutter 1981; Linz and Stepan 1996; Linz 2000)
Economic models Dictators are rational actors who use repression and distribution as the key mechanisms to regulate elite conflict. (Tullock 1987; Wintrobe 1990, 1998; Olson 1993, 2000)
23
Note: Author’s compilation
Neopatrimonial / Sultanistic regimes
Regime / state structures can be separated into personal neopatrimonial rule and institutional corporate rule. These differences can explain variation in numerous outcomes, such as authoritarian breakdown, mode and outcome of transitions, vulnerability to revolutions, economic development etc. (Médard 1982; Goldstone 1982; Goodwin and Skocpol 1989; Remmer 1989b; Bratton and van de Walle 1994, 1997; Chehabi and Linz 1998; Goodwin 2001; Erdmann and Engel 2007)
New institutionalism of authoritarianism
Electoral authoritarianism
A major challenge to authoritarian incumbents comes from opposition groups as they struggle for power in the electoral arena under conditions of restricted but meaningful moderate competition (Levitsky and Way 2002, 2010; Schedler 2002, 2006 a/b, 2009; Howard and Roessler 2006; Gandhi and Lust-Okar 2009); elections as a new mode of transition to democracy (Lindberg 2006; 2009).
Coalition models Mixed models
Authoritarian politics are elite politics structured by institutions such as militaries, dominant parties, patronage networks, or royal courts. (Geddes 1999, 2003; Bogaards 2004; Smith 2005; Ulfelder 2005; Gandhi and Przeworski 2006, 2007; Magaloni 2006, 2008; Greene 2007; Brownlee 2007; Hadenius and Teorell 2007; Wright 2008; Svolik 2009; Ezrow and Frantz 2011) Selectorate theories: political survival depends on the ability of leaders to maintain loyalty of members of their coalition (e.g. Roeder 1993; Haggard and Kaufman 1995, 1997; Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003). In mixed models, access and use of rents can also play a role (e.g. Smith 1995).
24
Limited pluralism is the key characteristic of authoritarian regimes that sets them apart
from both totalitarian regimes that aim to control public as well as private lives of their
citizens and from democracies in which citizens enjoy unlimited pluralism. Limitations,
according to Linz, can be de facto or de jure, limited to political parties only or
extended to interest groups too. Despite formal legal limitations, under authoritarianism
the existence of independent groups is tolerated and sometimes even encouraged. Some
authoritarian regimes can even institutionalize political participation of a selected
number of interest groups. A good example, cited by Linz, is the PRI in Mexico which
aimed at institutionalizing “a complex pluralism” (Linz 1964, 298). As Purcell (1973,
30) clarified, limited political pluralism implies that the links between interests groups
and the regime put interest groups in a dependent position, in which the leaders of
interests groups “owe their primary allegiance to the regime’s elite and are only
secondarily dependent upon the support of their followers”.
Moreover, authoritarian regimes typically use co-optation of leaders in “a
constant process by which different sectors or institutions become participants in the
system” (Linz 1964, 300). Repression is also used when necessary, but is more limited
than under totalitarianism. In addition, authoritarian regimes are guided by mentalities
rather than ideologies with the key difference being that ideologies are intellectual
systems of thought with utopian vision while mentalities are more emotional than
rational and focus on the past or the present. Another feature of authoritarian regimes is
predictability of leadership. Finally, while authoritarian regimes usually display
intensive political participation at the formative stages of their development, generally
they have low levels of political mobilization.
In his later work, Linz advanced a more nuanced classification of nondemocratic
regime types (see Linz and Stepan 1996; Chehabi and Linz 1998). A new classification
includes four basic categories of nondemocratic rule: totalitarian, post-totalitarian,
authoritarian, and sultanistic regimes. These regimes display differences in the degree of
political pluralism, popular participation, mass mobilization and ideology of political
leaders. The concept of post-totalitarianism was included to capture the change in the
nature of communist regimes, especially the fading role of revolutionary ideology.
Sultanism, another addition to the original classificatory scheme, is a distinctive
type of nondemocratic rule, characterized by arbitrary exercise of authority by a
25
strongman and his clients, weak ideology and lack of organized participation in power,
and government seeking private goals rather than serving collective interests (Linz
1975, 179).
Another prominent study of authoritarianism is related to the work of O’Donnell.
O’Donnell (1973; 1979) argued that higher levels of modernization gave rise to
“bureaucratic-authoritarian” systems in some countries of South America, primarily
Argentina and Brazil. This argument challenged the prevailing theory of modernization
which postulated a positive relationship between socio-economic development and
democracy. Bureaucratic authoritarianism is defined as the rule by civilian and military
technocrats who adopt “a self-avowedly technocratic, bureaucratic, nonpersonalistic
approach to policymaking and problem solving” (Collier 1979, 399). Bureaucratic
authoritarian regimes eliminate electoral competition and control popular participation.
Their goal is to promote advanced industrialization (Collier 1979). O’Donnell argued
that these exclusionary military regimes emerged in those countries of South America
where the “deepening” of industrialization required the insulation of state policymaking
from the demands of organized interest groups and therefore measures were taken to
exclude or “de-activate” the popular sectors.
Finally, political economists (Tullock 1987; Wintrobe 1998) developed
economic models of autocracy centered on the interests and calculations of dictators.
These models rest on the basic premise that all dictators are motivated by the same goal:
to hold onto power. But the fact that dictatorial leaders cannot know who supports them
and who does not makes all dictators inherently insecure. Following this logic,
Wintrobe (1990; 1998) showed how autocrats use the combination of repression and
economic redistribution to deal with the problem of insecurity.
To summarize, by elaborating concepts, classifications and models of
authoritarian regimes as well as important insights the classic works have advanced our
understanding of authoritarian polities and politics. These works laid the foundation for
subsequent theorizing about different types of authoritarian regimes.
1.2. “New institutionalism” of authoritarianism Recent work on authoritarian politics has examined how institutional-structural features
that define different kinds of authoritarian regimes shape leader behavior and affect
important political and economic outcomes (Geddes 1999; Ezrow and Frantz 2011). It is
26
well known that authoritarian regimes rely on different sets of formal and informal
institutions that both constrain and enable the behavior of their leaders. Given the focus
on the institutional foundations of authoritarian regimes, I found it appropriate to use
the term “new institutionalism of authoritarianism” to refer to this body of research.
This term is borrowed from Roeder (1993) who first applied it as a framework for
explaining the collapse of the Soviet Union. Following the established definition of
political institutions as humanly devised constraints that shape human behavior (North
1990) or “constraints on, and opportunities for, individual behavior” (Diermeier and
Krehbiel 2003, 125),7 Roeder (1993) argued that in order to understand authoritarian
politics it was important to take authoritarian institutions seriously. Analysis of
authoritarian rules of the game (or a “constitution”) can help researchers answer
important questions about the locus of state policymaking power, the identity of key
constituencies to which power holders are held accountable (“selectorate”) and the
relationship between power holders and the selectorate. Roeder (1993, 22) maintained
that the new institutionalism “challenges the ways in which we usually analyze
authoritarian politics. It asks us to find the rules that pattern and constrain political
choices. It directs us to identify the political institutions that shape political processes
and the path of political development”.
Schedler (2009) proposes to distinguish between “old” and “new”
institutionalism in the study of authoritarian regimes, but reserves the latter for
“nominally democratic institutions” only. Whereas the “old institutionalism” was
concerned with organizations and strategies of coercion, new institutionalism shifted the
emphasis on institutions typically associated with liberal democracy, such as elections,
courts, parliaments and media (Schedler 2009, 4).
In this study, the term “new institutionalism of authoritarianism” is used to refer
to those studies that analyze authoritarian politics from the institutionalist perspective
(which means accepting the basic analytical position of new institutionalism about the
relevance and influence of not just formal-legal rules but “actual rules in practice”
(Roeder 1993, 9), whether they focus on dominant parties, militaries or nominally
democratic institutions. To be sure, institutions were seen as important in some older
works too (see e.g. studies of one-party states in Huntington and Moore 1970), but 7 On the new institutionalist turn in political science in general, see Hall and Taylor (1996), Immergut (1998), March and Olsen (1984).
27
recent studies have explicitly emphasized institutional dynamics in different forms of
dictatorship and the roles played by various institutions in the context of
authoritarianism. They argue that political institutions perform important functions for
maintaining authoritarian stability. Political parties, the parliament and other institutions
are seen, each in its own way, as crucial arenas for leaders and their elites to manage
intra-elite conflict and to cement pro-regime coalitions to enhance regime durability.
Recent scholarship (Geddes 1999; Smith 2005; Brownlee 2007; Magaloni 2008)
focuses on differences in institutional forms and power-sharing arrangements and the
consequences of these differences for regime longevity. A large part of this work (e.g.,
Geddes 1999, 2005; Levitsky and Way 2010; for an overview, see Magaloni and
Kricheli 2010) emphasizes the strength of ruling parties which by operating as a
credible power-sharing arrangement and an institutionalized mechanism for managing
internal elite interactions allow single-party regimes to survive for longer periods of
time. Recent works on authoritarian politics demonstrate that institutional-structural
features that define different kinds of authoritarian regimes influence political behavior
(Geddes 1999; Frantz and Ezrow 2011). These studies show that the properties of
authoritarian regimes are consequential for the stability/vulnerability of regimes. In fact,
these works see authoritarian survival as endogenous to the institutional design of
authoritarian rule itself. Geddes (1999) argues that the differences in institutional
characteristics influence the breakdown of authoritarian regimes and the outcomes of
regime transitions in “systematically different ways” (Geddes 1999). Therefore, it is
reasonable to expect that the institutional characteristics that shape leaders’ preferences
can also shed light on the influence of oil on the persistence (breakdown) of
authoritarian regimes and their subsequent democratization.
The diversity of forms of authoritarianism has received an increased attention by
contemporary researchers. The institutional differences that separate one authoritarian
regime from another are seen now as important independent variables that can help
understand and explain the patterns of political behavior as well as a number of political
and economic outcomes (Geddes 1999; Gandhi and Przeworski 2006, 2007; Hadenius
and Teorell 2007; Gandhi 2008; Magaloni 2008; Wright 2008; Ezrow and Frantz 2011).
Within the recent new institutionalist literature, one strand of research has
concentrated on the electoral arena where the authoritarian incumbents and opposition
28
groups compete for political power. The fate of authoritarian leaders and their regimes
is decided in electoral politics. The focus of this strand of literature has been on the role
of nominally democratic institutions in nondemocratic settings and is associated with
the concept of “electoral authoritarianism” and, together with research on “defective
democracy” (Merkel 2004), is often included in the study of so called “hybrid regimes”
(see Diamond 2002; Bogaards 2009). Electoral authoritarianism is seen as a peculiar
phenomenon of the third wave of democratization. Scholars of “electoral
authoritarianism” (Schedler 2006 a/b) have argued that after the end of the Cold War
many authoritarian leaders adopted various institutions of modern democracy but
essentially manipulated electoral competition to their own advantage. Within this
literature a new concept of “competitive authoritarianism” has been introduced to
designate a new modal type of political regimes that boast meaningful electoral
competitiveness, yet refuse to provide a level playing field for regime competitors
(Levitsky and Way 2002; 2010).
Another strand of research has focused on elite-level politics and coalitions.
Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003), for example, advanced the selectorate theory where
“selectorate” is defined as a subset of society upon whose support a dictator is
dependent while his survival depends on a subset of the selectorate named the “winning
coalition”. If the dictator adopts policies diverting resources from this support group he
would face threats of being removed from office. The most influential work in this
tradition is Geddes’ study of authoritarian regimes.
Geddes’ (1999; 2003) categorization of authoritarian regimes synthesizes a
number of theoretical contributions from previous research on different forms of
authoritarian polities. Geddes considers the most important differences among
authoritarian regimes to be qualitative. Authoritarian regimes are classified as
personalist, military, single-party, or hybrids of the pure types. Geddes’ main argument
is that different forms of authoritarian regimes collapse in characteristically different
ways. The reason why this happens is that different structural and institutional
characteristics induce different interests and motivations for political leaders with
regard to maintaining power. This includes the organization of intra-elite relationships,
selection of leaders and succession procedures, links with society and opposition and
other institutional differences. These differences have important implications for the
29
ways in which authoritarian regimes break down and their chances to be replaced by a
democracy (Geddes 2003, 48).
In military regimes, military officers decide who will rule and affect policy
making (as in Brazil, 1964-85). In personalist regimes, an individual ruler is
unconstrained in controlling access to office and policy making. A leader may be a
military person or may have created a party to support himself, but the military or the
party does not have an independent authority (as in Uganda under Idi Amin, 1971-79).
In single-party regimes, including both one-party regimes and hegemonic party
regimes, one party dominates access to offices and control over policy (as in today’s
China). Sartori (1976) distinguished between ‘one-party states’, where only one party
exists and outlaws other parties (e.g. North Korea), and ‘hegemonic party systems’,
where one party is dominant and “other parties are allowed to exist but as second class,
licensed parties” (Sartori 1976, 230), such as Mexico under PRI (see Bogaards 2000;
Magaloni and Kricheli 2010). Geddes does not make a distinction between the two
types of party dominance. For the sake of consistency and comparability of results, I
retain the original Geddes terminology and use ‘single-party’ or ‘party-based’ to refer to
both types of party dominance in authoritarian settings (see Smith 2005 for a similar
approach).
Geddes’ work has been fruitful and stimulated new research on various aspects
of authoritarianism (see e.g. Peceny et al. 2002; Smith 2005; Ulfelder 2005; Wright
2008; Wright and Escribà-Folch 2012). New typologies try to capture distinctions
between different forms of authoritarian rule, but classic categorical typologies, such as
Geddes’, have several advantages including the simplicity of the coding procedures,
cross-national applicability, and the emphasis on institutional structures (parties,
militaries, and patronage networks) (Ezrow and Frantz 2011, 19). It is especially
suitable for examining the main research question of this study concerning the
vulnerability of different types of authoritarian regimes to the effects of oil. Using this
categorization, it is possible to examine oil’s influence on regime durability and
democratization from the perspective of the preferences of rulers – i.e. “actors or sets of
actors who perform as the chief executives of state institutions” (Levi 1989, 2) –
constrained by their respective institutional environments.
30
1.3. Classic typology Military regimes emerge as a result of military coups that overthrow civilian
governments. After taking over, military officers occupy governmental positions and
the leadership depends on the support of the officer corps for retaining governmental
power (Nordlinger 1977; Wintrobe 1990, 860). The most robust generalization about
nondemocratic regimes is that military regimes tend to be particularly unstable, short-
lived, and faster to transition to democracy. Typically, they hand power to civilians after
being in office for less than five years (Nordlinger 1977). However, why do military
regimes tend to be so unstable?
Geddes (1999) argues that military regimes contain the seeds of their own
destruction. The military is organized as a corporate hierarchical structure and because
of the corporate cohesiveness of the military the officer corps gives a higher priority to
the survival of the military institution itself. Therefore, if elite factionalism and splits
“threaten military unity and efficacy, most of the officer corps will opt for a return to
the barracks”. When the military decides to withdraw from politics, the military officers
more readily hand over power to a democratically elected government as most officers
can continue their military careers after the installation of a new democratic government
(Geddes 1999, 131).
Another explanation for the instability of military regimes focuses on military
governments’ inherent deficit of political loyalty. Military regimes are “regimes of
exception”, for they “lack both a long-term rationale for remaining in power and the
organizational channels for building stable bases of support” (Haggard and Kaufman
1995, 11). They are often intolerant of political participation. Nordlinger (1977, 58)
states, for example, that “few [military regimes] tempted to build mass parties and
where they have been created they turned out to be ineffectual structures because
genuine participation was not permitted”.
Another explanation links the instability of military regimes to the motivation
that drives the officers to take over political power. According to Wintrobe (1990), the
motive for military intervention relates to the military’s desire to increase state budget
allocation to the army. In his account, the military is modeled as “a budget-maximizing
bureau” pursuing increase in its budget (Wintrobe 1990, 861). Having secured increased
budget for the army, the military hand power over to a civilian regime. A military
31
government that wishes extend its stay in office for longer time may be incapable of
offering excessive salary increases to its personnel or to restrict funding increases to
certain subgroups within the military. This tends to breed internal discontent which
destroys internal cohesiveness of the military’s organizational structure and “possibly
breed a countercoup.” Such countercoups are quite common among military
governments (Wintrobe 1990, 862).
According to Riggs (1993), powerful public officials would support military
takeover if they feel that their interests are not served by the existing regime. He also
points out that military officers are bureaucrats and as such would support coup plotters
who during times of crisis promise to protect the military officers’ interests as public
employees (Riggs 1993, 200). Riggs suggests that we need to consider military rule as
bureaucratic polities. An inherent limitation of all bureaucratic polities is the lack of any
formula for establishing political legitimacy: “Bureaucracies can be very stable as
instruments of public administration when they are controlled by a legitimizing political
system, but they cannot, by themselves, create stable regimes” (Riggs 1993, 201).
Huntington (1970, 4) considered one-party rule as the only “principal” modern
form of authoritarianism, a product of modernization. The so-called ‘one-party systems’
can be strong or weak. Their strength, in Huntington’s view, derives from “the duration
and intensity of the struggle to acquire power or to consolidate power after taking over
the government” (Huntington 1970, 14). For Huntington (1968), ‘one-party systems’
emerge out of long violent struggles such as revolutions and nationalist movements
(Huntington 1968, 425). Building on this argument, Smith (2005; 2007) shows that
party strength depends on the circumstances in which the ruling party has had to
consolidate its power. Parties that faced significant opposition while struggling for
power are more likely to remain strong after they seized power.
In a similar vein, Levitsky and Way (2013) argue that as a subset of
authoritarian regimes ‘revolutionary regimes’ owe their resilience to the legacies of
violent struggles in which they were engaged in the formative years. Revolutionary
regimes including the regimes in China, Cuba, Iran, Mexico, and the USSR as well as
those which emerged from national-liberation struggles in Angola, Mozambique,
Vietnam, and Zimbabwe are shaped by the powerful forces of revolutionary legacies
and, as such, posses cohesive hegemonic parties and strong coercive apparatuses.
32
Huntington distinguished between ‘revolutionary one-party systems’ and
‘established one-party systems’. The former, such as those of Nazi Germany and the
Soviet Union under Stalin (called ‘totalitarian’, ‘mobilization’ or ‘movement regimes’
by other authors), were characterized by “social dynamism, autocratic and charismatic
leadership, disciplined party, highly developed ideology, stress on propaganda and mass
mobilization, combined with coercion and terror” (Huntington 1968, 23). ‘Established
one-party systems’, such as those of Spain and Mexico, resemble Linz’s definition of
authoritarianism and are characterized by low mobilization, corporate pluralism,
pragmatic rather than ideological goals, and a party that mainly aggregates and regulates
competing interests but is peripheral to the decision-making process (Huntington 1968,
40-41). ‘Established one-party systems’ emerged “from the process of transformation,
consolidation, and adaptation” of revolutionary one part-systems (Huntington 1968, 40).
This claim echoes Huntington’s earlier work on political institutionalization as
key to maintaining political order. As Huntington pointed out, strong single party rule,
which for him characterized complex societies at higher stages of development, induces
stable political regimes (Huntington 1968; Huntington and Moore 1970). For
Huntington, the ability of governments to provide for societal order and political
stability was a more important measure of political development than whether a regime
was competitive or not. Degree of government was more important than form of
government (Huntington 1968, 1). He considered political institutionalization, defined
as “the process by which organizations and procedures acquire value and stability”
(1968, 12), as the most crucial condition for political stability and, from this point of
view, strong single party rule was seen as effective at ensuring order and political
stability.
1.4. What is personalism? Social scientists believe that the key distinction between autocracies lies between
personal, neopatrimonial dictatorships and more institutional, corporate forms of
authoritarianism (Goodwin and Skocpol 1989; Goodwin 2001). Yet, the meaning of the
term ‘personal rule’ has been mired in terminological controversy (Guliyev 2011).
There is a variety of concepts used by scholars to refer to ‘personal rule’, most
prominent of which are ‘personal rule’ (Jackson and Rosberg 1982, 1984; Sandbrook
1985), ‘neopatrimonial regime’ (Bratton and van de Walle 1994, 1997; Médard 1982;
33
Remmer 1989a/b; Snyder 1992), ‘prebendalism’ (Joseph 1987), ‘predatory rule’ (Lewis
1996), ‘sultanistic regime’ (Linz and Stepan 1996; Chehabi and Linz 1998; Snyder
1998; Linz 2000), and ‘kleptocracy’ (Andreski 1968; Acemoglu et al. 2004). Despite
terminological differences, these concepts refer to the “same general phenomena under
related theoretical labels” (Bratton and van de Walle 1997, 63) and, according to
Médard, “the theoretical differences [between these concepts] are trivial and mostly
semantic” (quoted in Bratton and van de Walle 1997, 90). For example, the concept of
personalist authoritarian regime is defined by reference to the theoretical material on
neopatrimonial and sultanistic regimes (Geddes 1999, 132-134; Ulfelder 2005, 315).
Some researchers have questioned the usefulness of the concept of personal rule
as employed in regime analysis. A wide variety of terms, definitions and
conceptualizations that exist led some scholars to suggest that the concept
(neopatrimonialism, in this case) is so vague and elusive that it has become a “catch-all
concept” (Theobald 1982, 555; Erdmann and Engel 2007). Some proposed to abandon it
altogether (Hadenius and Teorell 2007; Magaloni 2008; Pitcher et al. 2009). Given the
importance of this concept for the purposes of the present research – such as the
expectation that oil is closely linked to personalism – and its prominence in studies of
so-called ‘weakly institutionalized’ politics in the developing and post-Soviet countries,
it seems necessary to take a closer look at the concept of personal rule.
Modern concepts of personal rule are adaptations of Max Weber’s concept of
patrimonialism (Weber 1978[1922]; Bendix 1962). In Weber’s tripartite typology of
Herrschaft, patrimonialism is a type of traditionalist domination which develops from
patriarchal structure through an extension of the ruling chief’s family household. From
patriarchalism it retains the source of legitimation derived from sacred tradition. The
patrimonial ruler’s exercise of authority is constrained by tradition but is at the same
time arbitrary. In contrast to patriarchal authority, patrimonial authority is maintained
with the help of an administrative staff which, however, preserves in many respects the
mechanics of the patriarchal household administration. Notably, the patrimonial staff is
used for the personal interests of the ruler whom it also owes personal allegiance. An
extremely discretionary variant of patrimonialism is called sultanism. In a nutshell, the
essence of patrimonial domination is in “government as the ruler’s private domain”
(Bendix 1962, 334).
34
The revival of interest in Weber’s concept of patrimonialism is associated with
Roth (1968). Roth argued that beliefs in traditional legitimacy eroded in most places of
the world but certain related “actual operating modes and administrative arrangements”
survived (1968, 195). In view of this change, he differentiated between two types of
patrimonialism: traditionalist and de-traditionalized (personal rulership). Some of the
new states in the developing world were “merely private government” for those who
were powerful enough to run it (Roth 1968, 196).
Related to Roth’s concept of personal rulership is the concept of personal rule
developed by Africanist scholarship, most notably Jackson and Rosberg (1982; 1984).
“Political systems of personal rule” are defined as “institutionless polities” based on
personal relations, coercion and clientelism (Jackson and Rosberg 1982, 8). The authors
note that personal rule is not incompatible with bureaucratization. Thus, creation of
organizations at the lower levels of state (bureaucratization) need not be equated with
the establishment of effective institutions. Institutions are the rules that effectively bind
the behavior of political actors. The bureaucratization at the level of administrative
apparatus together with the accompanying personalization at the level of decision-
making results in the emergence of ‘personal-bureaucratic systems’ in which the
strengthened organizational capacity of the bureaucratic apparatus is used as “an
instrument of the ruler’s will to dominate” (Jackson and Rosberg 1982, 5).
As with personal rule, the concept of neopatrimonialism or ‘Big Man Rule’
(Hyden 2006) was advanced primarily by Africanist specialists (Médard 1982; Bratton
and van de Walle 1997), but has also been applied in other regions including Southeast
Asia and the post-Soviet world, especially the Caucasus and Central Asia (Ishiyama
2002; Bach 2011; Laruelle 2012; Isaacs 2014).
According to Hyden, although personalism and clientelism can be found in all
regions, the phenomenon is particularly prevalent in Africa and “a dominant feature of
politics there” (Hyden 2006, 105). Its basic premise is that patrimonialism is not
incompatible with modern state and Jackson and Rosberg’s view of personal rule as
noninstitutionalized or as the ‘institutional void’ - the term suggested by Schedler
(personal communication, November 2011) – is too extreme. In fact, neopatrimonialism
is a set of informal institutions that are regularized, accepted and practiced. This
informal institutionalization can be seen as a kind of “another institutionalization” to
35
borrow the term from O’Donnell (1996). Formal rules, elections and public
bureaucracies exist and matter but in the reality of neopatrimonial regime informal rules
and norms take precedence over formal institutions.
Table 1.2. Paradigmatic cases of personal rule
As a conceptual construct, neopatrimonialism is a mixture of the traditional and
legal elements of domination (Erdmann and Engel 2007). Personal arbitrariness and the
conformity with customs are the essential characteristics of traditional domination from
which neopatrimonial rule retains only arbitrariness but not traditionalism (Bendix
1962, 295). Under neopatrimonialism, government continues to be treated by the ruler
as largely a private domain, just like under traditional patrimonialism, but customary
restrictions now become irrelevant. Moreover, the ruler’s personal powers are now
enhanced by his control of administrative and military apparatuses of the modern state
(Remmer 1989b, 165).
Another prominent concept of personal rule is ‘sultanistic regimes’ (Chehabi
and Linz 1998). In the most recent Linzian typology of nondemocratic regimes,
36
sultanism appears as an extremely arbitrary type of semi-traditional regimes (Linz 2000,
143-57). A typical sultanistic regime is characterized by the fusion of the private and the
public, familial power and dynasticism. No distinction is made between a state career
and personal service to the strongman who rules using “rewards and fear” to enact
compliance and loyalty.
The concept of personal rule is also used as part of classical typologies of
dictatorial regimes. Most prominently, ‘personal dictatorship’ appears in Huntington’s
(1991, 1991-92) typology alongside one-party systems and military regimes. Personalist
dictatorship is defined by Huntington as a regime in which “the individual leader is the
source of authority and that power depends on access to, closeness to, dependence on,
and support from the leader” (Huntington 1991-92, 581). A subset of personalist
dictatorships, called ‘sultanistic’, are characterized by “patronage, nepotism, cronyism,
and corruption” (Huntington 1991-92, 581).
Synthesizing contributions from the early work on personal rule, Geddes defines
‘personalist regime’ as a type of authoritarian regime in which power emanates from the
individual ruler who employs an informal patronage network to distribute material
benefits and provides access to office to his collaborators and supporters in exchange
for loyalty. The ruler also controls the bureaucratic apparatus and military and prevents
their development into strong independent bases of power that might challenge his rule.
In the other two types of authoritarianism, either the military or the party retains
autonomy and has some influence on policy-making and personnel decisions.
Considering the discussion above, personal rule can be defined as a type of authority
structure (i.e. patterns of how state authority is organized and how state power is used
(Kohli 2004, 9)), in which the ruler is an individual leader whose decision-making
power is institutionally unconstrained, who presides over a neopatrimonial public
administration and uses the patron-client network as the principal institutional
mechanism for wielding political power. The historic cases of personalist regimes are
presented in Table 1.2. Let us consider each of these characteristics in detail.
Individual ruler / “power monism”: In systems of personal rule, political power
is concentrated in the hands of single person rather than some collectively-run
institution. Oftentimes the leader organizes a clique to support his rule: “[d]uring and
after a seizure of power, personalist cliques are often formed from the network of
37
friends, relatives, and allies that surrounds every political leader” (Geddes 1999, 130).
But since a clique’s own survival depends on access to the ruler, cliques do not usually
act as a check on the ruler’s powers.
Furthermore, power monism entails, but is not limited, to the high concentration
of power in the executive. Since the executive can be a collective body, power monism
means specifically that all the decision-making authority resides within an individual,
not a collective executive (such as a political party or “military as an institution”).
Personalized decision-making is, however, not sufficient for a macro-concept of
personal rule. Strictly speaking, it stands for a personal ruler in the narrow sense.
Neopatrimonial administration refers to the condition of subordination of the
state coercive and administrative apparatuses to the individual executive on the basis of
the “loyalty and rewards” principle. It is a distinct type of administration as it combines
certain characteristics of both types of Weber’s original scheme. The ideal-type
bureaucracy is a professional organization characterized by “formal employment,
salary, pension, promotion, specialized training and functional division of labor, well-
defined areas of jurisdiction, documentary procedures, hierarchical sub- and super-
ordination” (Weber 1978[1922], 1393). “Weberian” bureaucracy also preserves a
degree of autonomy and acts as a “corporately coherent entity” (Evans 1989, 567).
Purely patrimonial administration, by contrast, serves as a merely personal
instrument of the ruler (Weber 1978 [1922], 231-232). A patrimonial administrator’s
loyalty to his office is based not on “his impersonal commitment …to impersonal tasks
which define its extent and its content, it is rather a servant’s loyalty based on a strictly
personal relationship to the ruler” (Weber 1978 [1922], 1030-31). A patrimonial
administration is maintained by the ruler’s granting of benefices (for example,
allowances in kind or fees) and fiefs to his staff. The ruler recruits his staff according to
particularistic, rather than merit-based, criteria (for example, family membership,
inheritance rules, personal loyalty) to serve mainly the private ends of his leadership
(Weber 1978[1922], 1031-38; Delany 1962).
The existence of “patrimonial administration” in modern times would be an
anachronism, for most contemporary states are governed with a public administration
which is, at least formally, built on the principles of Weberian legal-rational
bureaucracy (Erdmann and Engel 2007). While patrimonial administrations differ in
38
their professionalism and infrastructural capacity – some are simply dysfunctional –
conceptually, however, it is not correct to equate inefficiency and dysfunctionality with
patrimonial administration which, in Weber’s account, is simply a certain kind of
administration.
Some scholars (Callaghy 1984, 73-75; Hutchcroft 1991, 416) pointed out that
Weber allowed for a bureaucratic rationalization of patrimonial rulership that did not
undermine its essentially patrimonial character. Indeed, Weber referred to certain
historical mixes of rational and traditional forms of domination as to “patrimonial-
bureaucratic states”. But to avoid any confusion with those historical forms, the term
neopatrimonial administration can be used to refer to an organizationally hybrid
arrangement whereby patrimonial features are built into the formally structured
bureaucratic organization (Clapham 1985, 48-49). Bratton and van de Walle (1997, 62)
describe such constellation in terms of the incorporation of patrimonial logic into
bureaucratic institutions. In fact, patrimonial principles and bureaucratic procedures can
reinforce each other.
At a more disaggregate level, a useful distinction can be made between
bureaucracy’s high-level managers and low-level “implementers”. The ruler of a
neopatrimonial staff maintains personal control of the state apparatus through the
appointment of loyal retainees, which stands for the patronage system (Riggs 1993,
229). This is typically accomplished by providing allies with jobs at the top and high
(managerial) levels of public administration. They, in turn, become “clients” of the ruler
and are personally loyal to him. Whereas the traditional patrimonial apparatus in
Weber’s scheme is a personal administrative staff, a modern neopatrimonial
administration is based on personal (non-ideological) loyalty/dependence and some
form of merit-based personnel recruitment at lower levels of bureaucracy.
The typical patrimonial characteristics that can be found in any contemporary
neopatrimonial administration are personal obedience to the ruler by loyalist office-
retainees, material rewards and radial decision-making by direct orders. Describing
Pinochet’s rule in Chile as a neopatrimonial, rather than bureaucratic authoritarian,
regime Remmer (1989b, 165) especially highlighted radial decision-making and
personal control. Most important, neopatrimonial administration retains
patrimonialism’s private-regardingness: “Organizational ends [of patrimonial
39
organizations] are predominantly the private, subjective ones of their respective heads,
not public, ‘objective’ ones” (Delany 1962, 466).
Patron-client network: Related to neopatrimonial management is the patron-
client network. As neopatrimonial administration presupposes a loyalist network in
place, the informal institutional channel of patron-client ties is embedded in it. By
appointing retainees to the top administrative-bureaucratic positions, the ruler creates an
informal network whereby he stands as the chief patron. The retainees of high level
constitute the ruler’s immediate circle of “lieutenants and clients” (Jackson and Rosberg
1982, 41). By the same functional logic, the top-level clients use their status and access
to state resources to benefit themselves and distribute the spoils of the office to their
cronies, relatives and friends. This stands for political clientelism, namely a system
“based on an exchange of political support for material benefits between patrons and
clients … [involving] a hierarchical structure where multiple clients are connected to
each patron” (Kurer 1996, 653).
The patron-client network thus created provides the institutional infrastructure of
power which penetrates the state and society (Munck and Snyder 2004; Snyder and
Mahoney 1999). The reach of the patronage network varies and can be highly
consequential for the fate of the regime (Snyder 1992). Surprisingly, however, this
attribute of personal rule is neglected in a recent debate on authoritarian regime types.
For instance, Slater (2003) and Lai and Slater (2006) criticize Geddes’ (1999) typology
of authoritarian regimes for being based solely on the procedures for decisionmaking
and the composition of ruling coalitions. Drawing on Mann’s (1984) framework, Slater
(2003) proposes a two-dimensional typology with variation along both despotic power
(personalized vs. collective) and infrastructural power (party or military). The personal
type is excluded for allegedly lacking its own institution to enact decisions despite the
fact that even “primitive” chiefdoms are defined as polities with “institutional
governance” (Earle 1997, 14). However, by concentrating narrowly on regime
institutions, the author overlooks the possibility of the patronage network acting as a
functional equivalent.
Ezrow and Frantz (2011), too, present personalist regimes as a residual category.
However, the discussion above suggests that the patron-client network can be seen as an
[informal] organizational equivalent that distinguishes “personal rule” from other
40
authoritarian regimes, although to some extent patronage may be used in party-based
and military regimes as well. The differences between governance structures seem to be
qualitative as regimes also vary in the extent to which leaders rely on a dominant party
(see, e.g. Reuter and Remington 2009).
Personal rule may be further classified into common, decentralized, and highly
centralized. The common type includes all the features of personal rule but may develop
in two possible directions: toward a more dispersed clientelism or toward greater
centralization. These trends are known in the literature as prebendalism and
neosultanism, respectively.
Lewis (1996, 80) defines prebendalism as a “decentralized [neo]patrimonial
rule” (also see Joseph 1987, 63-68.). On the opposite side, a neosultanistic subtype of
personalist authority structure is “a highly centralized variant of personal governance
under which the ruler has maximum discretion” (Roth 1968, 203). Chehabi and Linz
(1998, 9-10) mention that the difference between neopatrimonialism and neosultanism
lies not only in the degree of arbitrariness but also in the size of the regime’s clientele.
As this feature is difficult to measure directly, the narrowness of the patronage network
(or “the circle of clients”) can serve as an additional qualitative indicator to distinguish
between subtypes of personal authority structures.
In sum, personal rule is defined here as a viable institutional arrangement of
authority and as a strategy of maintaining power. In contrast to some recent studies, I
have also emphasized the viability of personal rule as a separate category, characterized
by highly centralized control over decision-making, neopatrimonial state administration
(a mix of patrimonial and legal bureaucratic features) and the use of patronage network
as the main instrument for wielding power. The patron-client network is the central
institutional mechanism in regimes based on personal rule.
41
Chapter 2: The Curse of Petroleum Wealth
2.1. Introduction
Over the past two decades, many studies have focused on the economic and political
effects of natural resources, notably oil and gas, on a number of important political and
economic outcomes such as slower economic growth rates, autocracy and civil war (for
a review, see Ross 2014). Terms such as the “Dutch Disease” (The Economist 1977),
the “paradox of plenty” (Karl 1997, 1999), the “natural resource trap” (Collier 2007)
and the “resource curse” are often used by researchers to describe the negative effects of
natural resources.
This chapter provides a theoretical background to the “resource curse” literature
concentrating on the political effects. I divide research on the political dimension of the
“oil curse” into three main groups. Earlier research within the “resource curse” literature
was associated with the rentier state theory; recent studies stress the importance of
contextual variables and policy choices in conditioning the effects of oil wealth on the
political regime and regime stability.
2.2. Economic effects
Initial empirical research on the resource curse was concerned with the economics of
natural resources, focusing on why states with abundant natural resources performed
worse than their resource-poor counterparts (see inter alia, Gelb and Associates 1988;
Sachs and Warner 1995, 2001; Auty 2001; Humphreys et al. 2007). Gelb and his
colleagues argue that the culprit was oil price volatility. Sachs and Warner (1995)
explored the relationship between natural resources and economic growth in a cross-
national regression model. They found a statistically significant negative association
between natural resource wealth, measured as a share of natural resource exports in
GDP (‘resource intensity’), and economic growth for the period 1970-1989. Economists
proposed three explanations for the adverse effects of natural resource wealth on
economic performance: the “Dutch disease”, waste and corruption, and the “voracity
effect”. Scholars such as Corden (1984) proposed the first economic mechanism called
the “Dutch disease”. The term “Dutch disease” refers to the harmful effects of natural
gas discoveries in the Groningen fields in the 1960s on the Dutch manufacturing sector
during the 1970s (Corden 1984; Davis 1995). The booming natural resource sector in
42
this account leads to the influx of foreign exchange into the domestic economy. This
causes the appreciation of the real exchange rate. Currency appreciation raises the cost
of exports of products from domestic (traded) manufacturing and other industries
producing the “crowding out” effect. As a consequence, export-oriented manufacturing
and agricultural sectors become less competitive, which results in the deindustrialization
of the economy in the mid term (Davis 1995).
Lane and Tornell (1996) advanced the second mechanism, which they called the
“voracity effect”. They argued that in countries with weak institutions, strong organized
groups and weak institutional barriers to discretionary fiscal redistribution, windfall
revenues fuel redistribution as powerful groups compete for access to discretionary
transfers from the government. The upsurge in redistributional competition reduces the
return to investment and, as a result, the aggregate growth rate declines. The authors
showed that, during the oil booms of the 1970s, Venezuela, Nigeria and Trinidad and
Tobago each experienced an increase in the distributive pressures exerted by powerful
interest groups. This manifested itself in increased activity of interest groups competing
to obtain a share of oil rents in the form of government transfers, which had a negative
effect on the overall economic performance. In Nigeria, the distribution of public
investment projects to major ethno-federal factions took such an extreme form of
corruption that one commentator described the situation as “mutual looting – the
political economy of state robbery” (Madanagu cited in Lane and Tornell 1996, 217).
Evidence of the confluence of oil and corruption from Nigeria’s oil boom was
used by Sala-i-Martin and Subramanian (2003) to elaborate the third mechanism linking
natural resources to poor economic performance – wasteful expenditure and corruption.
Data on the macroeconomic development revealed that despite the fact that from 1965
to 2000 Nigeria’s oil revenues reached a total of about US$ 350 billion, per capita GDP
in 2000 remained at the level of 1965 (US$ 245 and 325 respectively). It means that
over a period of 35 years oil revenues did not contribute to the improvement of living
standards of Nigerians. The statistical analysis conducted by the authors found that
resource rents had a strong negative effect on the institutional quality (such as the rule
of law and government accountability). The case study of Nigeria suggested that poor
institutions invited wasteful spending and corruption that were responsible for the
country’s dismal long-term performance. Research shows that indeed natural resources
43
may foster corruption in developing countries (Busse and Gröning 2011). It seems
plausible that certain features of the oil industry make oil-dependent developing states
particularly susceptible to corruption (McPherson and MacSearraigh 2007).
While economists were exploring the economic effects of natural resources,
political scientists were raising questions about the political implications of oil rents.
Why did the governments of oil states often fail to adopt good policies? What were the
causes and effects of massive rent-seeking in the wake of the oil booms? Did oil rents
affect political institutions and, if so, how? What were oil’s effects on the political
regimes of the oil exporters? A vigorous strand of political science research emerged to
address these and related questions (for reviews, see Ross 1999; Cooley 2001; Rosser
2006; Dunning 2009; Heinrich 2011).
The development of the strand of political research on the “resource curse” can
be divided into three periods or waves. The first wave is a series of monographic studies
that championed the influential “rentier state” thesis; the second wave consists of
correlational analyses; and the third wave – revisionist studies advancing conditional
theories. Table 2.1 below presents a summary of the main arguments and their
representative authors.
2.3. First generation: The rentier state theory The first wave, from the late 1980s through the 1990s, consists of individual country
studies that advance some version of the rentier state thesis (Anderson 1987; Beblawi
and Luciani 1987; Chaudhry 1989, 1994, 1997; Crystal 1990; Ismael 1993; Gause 1994;
Yates 1996; Karl 1997; Vandewalle 1998). The central claim of the rentier state
research is that the impact of oil is homogenous: oil windfalls produce rentier states in
countries with otherwise different characteristics. These scholars argue that large oil
windfalls distort states institutions producing fiscally autonomous, functionally
distributive states with weak bureaucratic capacity.
The concept of the “rentier state” was advanced in the 1970s to highlight the
changing character of the state in the Middle East. Two processes are believed to be key
– the way the state collects revenues and the way it spends it. According to H. Mahdavy
(1970), rentier states are “those countries that receive on a regular basis substantial
amounts of external rents” (Mahdavy 1970, 428) and “only few are engaged in the
generation of this rent (wealth), the majority being only involved in the distribution or
44
utilization of it” (Beblawi 1987, 51). “Rentier states live largely off unearned income:
the state is resourced with little organizational or political effort on the part of the state
apparatus, and especially little such effort in relation to their domestic populations”
(Moore 2004, 304).
The externality of the major source of state revenue is thought to have two
important political consequences. First, oil revenues bypass the domestic private sector
and accrue directly to the state’s coffers, thus concentrating wealth in the state sector.
The state becomes a dominant economic actor in the domestic economy. Second, oil
rents relieve the government from the need to levy taxes from the domestic population.
In consequence, the state grows into a large, fiscally autonomous organization whose
main activity is concentrated on the distribution or allocation of accumulated wealth.
This distinct way of deriving national income, rentier theory scholars argues, was a
disincentive for Arab leaders to create and develop bureaucratic structures of the
modern statehood. For example, Chaudhry (1989) observed that increased oil revenues
led to the dismantling of the extractive institutions in Saudi Arabia.
With rents accruing directly to the government coffers, the state turns into a key
player in the domestic economy and the source of accumulated wealth. Distributing or
allocating wealth becomes the primary activity of rentier states distinguishing them
(“allocation states”) from “production states” (Luciani 1987). For Delacroix (1980), for
example, Kuwait (and to a lesser extent other Gulf states) represented an ideal
distributive state in which “the bulk of the internal activities of the state are concerned
with distribution. [In Kuwait] this takes the form of all-pervading welfarism, accounting
for 20 percent of all government expenditures. Water, electricity and essential
foodstuffs are subsidized” (Delacroix 1980, 12).
The experience of rentier states was compared with the process of state-building
in early modern European states. The thesis that the source of government revenue may
have an influence on important political outcomes has a rich lineage in fiscal sociology.
As an analytical approach, the “fiscal sociology paradigm” was applied in recent studies
of politics and state-formation in the developing world (for an insightful discussion, see
Moore 2004; for recent applications, see Bräutigam et al. 2008). An influential research
on early modern early Europe ascribed a central role to taxation in the formation of
states and the evolution of representative government in Western Europe. Fiscal
45
sociology is associated with the names of Joseph Schumpeter, Michael Mann, Charles
Tilly, and more recently, Douglass North and Barry Weingast (see e.g. North and
Weingast 1989; for an excellent discussion of this literature and the empirical test of the
link between taxation and democracy, see Vandewalle 1998; Ross 2004b). According to
these scholars, in early modern Europe state apparatuses evolved out of the rulers’ need
to maintain strong armies (which in turn was motivated by geopolitical considerations
of survival). Monarchs of England, France and other European countries faced the
imperative to support growing armies for which the only source was income collected
as taxes. Extraction of taxes required that the rulers put in place state institutions
capable of collecting information about the population and extracting resources
effectively. Thus, state-building went hand in hand with the growth, expansion and
sophistication of fiscal institutions. In English history, the Crown’s need for revenues
and dependence on taxes led to a situation in which private capital interests were able
gradually to increase their bargaining power vis-à-vis the Crown, leading to the
strengthening of the institution of Parliament (North and Weingast 1989). Eventually,
this led to the establishment of representative government in England and elsewhere in
Western Europe.
According to rentier state theorists, the Middle Eastern oil states had a different
experience. Here the initial stage of state formation was accompanied with the influx of
resource rents. Unlike the process of extracting taxes, which requires having efficient
institutional mechanisms in place, rents were generated outside the domestic economy
and accrued directly to state coffers. Theories of rentier state contend that this
qualitatively different process of raising government finance had important and long-
lasting implications not only for institutional capacities of the states but also for the
prospects of democratization. Given a completely different fiscal mechanism in
operation, the states in Iran and the Gulf region became autonomous and insulated from
their populations. As a consequence, institutions of representative government did not
evolve.
The rentier state theory has for a long time been a dominant explanation for the
exceptional lack of democratization in the Arab Middle East (for useful discussions, see
Anderson 2006; Lust 2011). “In countries like Kuwait and Libya, the state may be
virtually completely autonomous from its society,” wrote Anderson, “winning popular
46
acquiescence through distribution rather than support through taxation and
representation” (1987, 10). The rentier state thesis was popularized by Huntington
(1991) in the form of a more general statement about the relationship between taxation
and representation. Oil revenues tend to empower the bureaucracy by alleviating the
need to collect taxes, and lower taxation reduced the society’s demand for
representation and the need to keep their government accountable.
Outside Middle Eastern area studies, the rentier state thesis attracted attention of
comparatively oriented scholars. Karl (1997) used the rentier state model in her study of
Venezuela and other “petro-states”. Yates (1996, 2005) found that in Sub-Saharan
Africa Gabon had all characteristics of a typical rentier state. Some recent works
extended the geographical domain of the rentier state thesis to include present-day
Russia and the Caspian states of the former Soviet Union (see Gawrich et al. 2009;
Gawrich et al. 2011; Kim 2003). Gervasoni (2010) applied the rentier theory to explain
variation in the levels of democracy at the subnational level in Argentina.
In sum, the rentier state theory has been the dominant explanation for why oil
states tend to have authoritarian government and weak states (see, e.g. Anderson 1987;
Beblawi and Luciani 1987; Karl 1997; Yates 1996; for a more critical view of the
concept, see Herb 2005; Richter 2012). It also predicted that oil states would be
politically unstable. Luciani (1994), one of the earlier proponents of the authoritarian
rentier state thesis, developed a theoretical model in which authoritarian viability was
seen as a function of the availability of oil rents: abundant rents perpetuate authoritarian
regimes whereas the fiscal crisis of the state associated with rent scarcity can trigger
authoritarian breakdown and stimulate democratization. Much of the theorizing about
the authoritarian effects of oil is derived from the rentier state thesis. Relieved from the
need to extract taxes from the population, a rentier state enjoys fiscal autonomy from
the domestic economy and societal groups. Fiscal autonomy, in turn, creates
disincentives for state elites to develop extractive institutions which are seen as
important for the development of the state’s bureaucratic capacity. As Karl argued, state
weakness was a natural outcome of resource “plenty” as rentier states were relying on
the “substitution of public spending for statecraft” (Karl 1997, 16).
Scholars of the rentier state theory make two claims with regard to the effects of
commodity (oil) booms and busts. One claim is that instability is highly likely during
47
the bust period as decline in revenues decreases the ability of regimes to buy off popular
support. The second claim is that boom periods can have destabilizing effect through
the Dutch disease effects. Considering the high degree of fiscal volatility associated
with oil revenues, when international energy prices are favorable to generate sufficient
windfall revenues oil states manage to sustain their “shallow” regime stability; during
the bust cycles, when fiscal revenues are in short supply, rentier states are expected to
break down. An even more pessimistic line within the rentier-state literature holds that
not only busts but also booms can put rentier-based economies under stress. Because
rentier states are so fundamentally fragile, the argument goes, they may collapse even
during “good times” (the collapse of the Pahlavi regime in Iran in 1979 is a
paradigmatic example). In short, the rentier fiscal structure and associated state
weakness increases the level of exposure of oil-dependent regimes to exogenous oil
shocks.
2.4. Second generation: Correlational studies
2.4.1. More oil, less democracy While much of the first generation research was monographic and qualitative, the
second wave comprises statistical analyses of large datasets. Scholars have repeatedly
found that, on average, oil inhibits democracy / democratization. In his study of
determinants of democracy, Barro (1999) shows that oil is correlated negatively with
the level of democracy, suggesting that high economic growth associated with oil
exports “does not have the usual positive linkage with democracy” (Barro 1999: 167).
Ross’ (2001b) article is the most influential work representing the second generation of
large-N studies. Based on the analysis of data covering 133 countries from 1971 to
1997, Ross demonstrates that resource (fuels) dependence has a significant negative
correlation with democracy and that this effect is not limited to any particular region
(such as the Middle East or sub-Saharan Africa). Using improved methods and better
measures of the key variables in another study (2009), Ross finds that “oil wealth
strongly inhibits democratic transitions in authoritarian states, that this pattern is
reasonably robust, and that regardless of any possible countervailing pro-democracy
effects, oil’s net impact on democratic transitions is strongly negative” (Ross 2009, 2).
48
He also observes that the antidemocratic effects of oil wealth are not uniform: they have
become stronger over time, and Latin America is the only region that was not affected.
Several other studies provide quantitative support for the claim about the inverse
relationship between oil and democracy (De Soysa 2002; Wantchekon 2002; Epstein et
al. 2006; Ulfelder 2007; Gassebner et al. 2009; Goldberg et al. 2008; Jensen and
Wantchekon 2004; Ross 2009; Tsui 2010; Aslaksen 2010). Using a different measure of
oil wealth, Fish (2002) finds that the relationship between oil and democracy is
negative. Jensen and Wantchekon (2004, 836) show that in Sub-Saharan Africa mineral
resources, including oil, had a negative effect on the level of democracy, and that
African countries with higher levels of resource dependence “tended to be more
authoritarian than their less resource dependent counterparts”.
Goldberg and coauthors (2008) test the resource curse hypothesis with data on
the U.S. states between 1929 and 2002 and find resource dependence to be associated
with less electoral competitiveness and increased advantages for the incumbent
governors in resource-rich states. The authors conclude: “oil production does appear to
be undemocratic, if by that one means the opposition is less likely to come to power”
(Goldberg et al. 2008, 506). Tsui (2010) finds that discovering oil resources
significantly decreases a country’s democracy level. Similarly, Ramsay (2011) provides
evidence for the argument that increases in oil income have negative effects on the
political institutions of oil producing countries.
2.4.2. Spurious relationship? Measurement issues There are skeptical views on the resource curse theory (see Gurses 2009; Haber and
Menaldo 2011; Herb 2005; Okruhlik 1999; Oskarsson and Ottosen 2010; Treisman
2010; Wacziarg 2012). The main criticism concerns the problem of omitted variables.
Influential research by political economists such as Acemoglu and collaborators
demonstrates that institutions are shaped by history. Country-specific institutions
inherited from colonial times in turn determine important political and economic
outcomes such as relative economic development (see e.g. Acemoglu et al. 2001).
Looking from this perspective, Haber and Menaldo (2011) argue that the relationship
between oil and regime type might be spurious, that is “any number of factors might
jointly determine [both] resource reliance and authoritarianism”. Given that energy
resources happen to be concentrated in countries with weak state capacity and given that
49
“countries’ underlying institutions are also correlated with their regime types, it is likely
that inveterately weak state capacity jointly determines authoritarianism and high levels
of resource reliance” (Haber and Menaldo 2011, 2).
Unlike Ross (2001b), who estimates between-county variations in a cross-
section, Haber and Menaldo (2011) use a within-country regression model to capture
changes in resource wealth and political regime over a considerably longer time period.
Their results find no relationship between fiscal reliance and authoritarianism over the
long run. Aslaksen (2010) finds that, contra to Haber and Menaldo’s results, the
relationship between oil and democracy remains negative even when controlling for
country-fixed effects. In response to Haber and Menaldo, Andersen and Ross (2011, 3)
note that Haber and Menaldo’s study has a number of flaws including the implausible
assumption that oil should have affected democratization throughout more than 200
years covered in their study. By replicating the study with some modifications, they find
that oil has strong authoritarian effects only after the 1970s due to a wave of
nationalizations that produced the ‘rentier states’.
The fact that in Latin America oil promoted democracy does not invalidate the
thesis about the authoritarian effects of oil rents though. Dunning (2008) argues that
oil’s effects on regime type are conditional and depend on two other structural factors,
namely, the extent of private inequality and the degree of resource dependence.
Table 2.1. Three generations of political research on the “resource curse”
Resource curse
Main contribution
Dependent variable(s)
Main argument
1st generation
The rentier state theory
State institutions, state capacity, regime (in)stability
Oil rents cause state weakness by undermining fiscal institutions of the state. Oil states operate by distributing wealth not producing it. Populations of oil states are not actively involved in politics since low taxation leads to passive citizenry.
50
Authoritarian rulers maintain stability in two principal ways: by buying off popular support and/or repression. The stability of oil regimes is shallow and depends on the supply of rents. Representative scholars: (Anderson 1987; Beblawi and Luciani 1987; Chaudhry 1989, 1997; Crystal 1990; Gause 1994; Yates 1996; Karl 1997; Vandewalle 1998)
2nd generation
Statistical correlation between oil and political regime
Regime type, democratic transition and democratic consolidation, regime durability, leadership duration
Oil wealth promotes authoritarianism. (Barro 1999; Ross 2001, 2009; De Soysa 2002; Jensen and Wantchekon 2004; Epstein et al. 2006; Ulfelder 2007; Goldberg et al. 2008; Gassebner et al. 2009; Morrison 2009; Aslaksen 2010; Bueno de Mesquita and Smith 2010; Tsui 2010; Ramsay 2011) Regimes with oil are more durable than their oil-poor counterparts (Smith 2006, 2007). Oil promotes regime stability in both democracies and autocracies through lessening tax burden on elites in the former and increased social spending in the latter (Morrison 2009). Oil has a positive effect on leadership duration. (Omgba 2009; Andersen and Aslaksen 2010; Bueno de Mesquita and Smith 2010; Cuaresma et al. 2011).
51
Source: author’s compilation
Under certain conditions and through different causal mechanisms, oil can promote both
democracy and authoritarianism. He argues that resource rents make redistributional
conflict in society less important, especially if the level of social inequality is high (as in
Latin America), which reduces the incentives of elites to block democratization. This
can explain why oil had a positive effect on the political regimes in Latin America.
Researchers use two methods of testing the impact of oil on the dynamic of
regime change. One approach is to estimate how oil predicts change on the “regime
type” measured as a continuous variable (degrees of democracy or degrees of
autocracy). The second approach focuses on the impact of oil on certain stages,
components or aspects of democratization such as transition to democratic rule or
democratic consolidation. Most quantitative studies (e.g. Ross 2001) use the first
approach to estimate an average effect of oil on democracy, a research strategy built on
the continuous concept of political regime and based on the assumption that democracy
3rd generation
Heterogeneous effects of oil (conditional upon other factors)
Regime type, regime stability
Oil can promote both democracy and authoritarianism depending on other structural factors and through different mechanisms (Dunning 2008). Oil’s effect on regime stability depends on the timing of oil boom relative to regime consolidation (Smith 2006, 2007). Oil’s effects on regime stability depend on rulers’ calculus of risks and benefits of diversification (Dunning 2005).
Skeptics No curse Regime type, democratization
There is no relationship between oil and regime type, or the relationship is spurious. (Okruhlik 1999; Herb 2005; Gurses 2009; Oskarsson and Ottosen 2010; Treisman 2010; Haber and Menaldo 2011; Wacziarg 2012).
52
is a matter of degree. Thus, strictly speaking, much of quantitative work on the link
between oil and regime type measures the effect of oil wealth / resource dependence on
the levels of democracy rather than democratization per se. However, as argued by
Sartori (1991) and pointed out by Bogaards (2010, 476), conceiving of democracy as a
matter of degree “not only does away with the notion of a democratic transition, but it
also negates the concept of regime and regime type”.
2.4.3. Effects on democratic transitions / authoritarian survival Scholars of democratization point to three components of democratization: the
liberalization of autocracy, the mode of democratic transition and the consolidation of
democracy (Schneider and Schmitter 2004). Ross’ study does not distinguish between
the components of democratization. The implicit concept of regime change in Ross’
study is a change of scores on the Polity scale, which is a common approach in
quantitative studies of democratization (Bogaards 2010, 477). But, as argued by
Ulfelder (2007), it is important to separate the processes of authoritarian survival from
the processes of democratic consolidation when examining the link between oil and
regime change. Most studies employ statistical models that use a continuous measure of
political regime and are estimated in cross-sectional samples that include all countries at
all levels of democracy. According to Ulfelder, this methodological approach is not
appropriate because the rentier state theory is a thesis about the survival of
authoritarianism not the stability of democracy. In other words, the rentier state thesis is
a claim about the role of oil in preventing democratic change in already authoritarian
regimes such as Saudi Arabia or Angola, not a claim that oil can undermine an
established democratic regime such as Norway’s. He argues that “if we think that
transitions from authoritarian rule to democracy are driven by forces that differ
fundamentally from the ones that affect the vulnerability of democracies to breakdown,
then we can probably obtain better estimates of those effects by developing models that
consider those change processes separately” (Ulfelder 2007, 996).
Anderson and Ross (2011) also admit that the most credible version of the
“political” resource curse thesis is the one that suggests that oil reduces the probability
that authoritarian states will democratize. In short, the key argument concerns the
likelihood of democratic transitions and the stability of authoritarian rule. Oil revenues
create opportunities for the incumbent leaders to perpetuate their regimes’ and own
53
political survival. Using the event-history method, Ulfelder (2007) finds a strong
positive association between oil wealth and authoritarian survival. He concludes that,
ceteris paribus, “autocracies that derive more of their national income from oil, natural
gas, and other mineral resources are substantially less likely to transition to democracy”
(Ulfelder 2007, 1012). Drawing on the material from Middle Eastern studies (e.g.,
Crystal 1990), Wantchekon (2002) suggests that resource wealth contributes to the
consolidation of already established authoritarian governments. Similarly, in the book
called Petrotyranny Bacher (2000, 17) states, “Oil wealth is the biggest single factor
sustaining these tyrannies [dictatorial regimes]” and gives an explanation as to why this
is so: “Oil is critical to the support of dictatorships since it provides the most abundant
form of wealth for a repressive government – income that does not have to be obtained
through taxation” (Bacher 2000, 19).
At the level of leadership, cross-national evidence suggests that chief executives
of oil-exporting states are more likely than those of non-oil states to stay in power. Oil
revenues help nondemocratic leaders survive and lengthen the duration of their
leadership (Omgba 2009; Andersen and Aslaksen 2010; Bueno de Mesquita and Smith
2010; Cuaresma et al. 2011). Bueno de Mesquita and Smith (2010), for instance,
examine how the structure of government finances affects the likelihood of leader
survival. Their analysis demonstrates that small-coalition rulers are more likely to
survive when they have access to “free resources”, such as resource rents or foreign aid.
2.4.4. Link to modernization theory The finding that oil inhibits democratization runs counter to conventional wisdom about
the positive effects of economic development on democratization. It appears that oil-
based economic growth has pro-authoritarian, rather than pro-democratic, effects. A
long and influential tradition in comparative democratic development, known as
modernization theory, has maintained that socioeconomic development causes
democratization. Representative scholars of the modernization school include, among
others, Karl Deutsch, Seymour Martin Lipset, Barrington Moore and, more recently
Ronald Inglehart. The classical statement of the modernization thesis is Lipset (1959)
(for an overview and the latest empirical test of the modernization hypothesis, with
disconfirming results, see Acemoglu et al. 2007). Scholars disagree on the exact nature
of this relationship, but that democracy is more likely in richer countries seems to be a
54
fairly established fact. Przeworski et al. (2000) argue that while there is no connection
between economic growth and the likelihood of democracy, higher income levels are
positively linked to sustainable democracy. Boix and Stokes (2003) find that economic
growth does promote democratic transitions.
The resource curse literature has challenged some of the assumptions
underpinning the modernization paradigm. It highlighted the importance of the source
of state revenues (such as taxes versus rents). The experience of oil-exporting states
suggests that not all sources of economic growth can be good for democracy. As Bueno
de Mesquita and Smith (2010, 949) put it, “the important factor in democratization is
not the wealth of a nation, but rather the source of this wealth” (italics supplied). From
the resource curse perspective, socioeconomic development driven by oil production
does not induce the kinds of societal changes that modernization theory claims should
promote democratic transitions.
2.4.5. Effects on democratic consolidation / democratic survival If resource dependence affects democratic transitions, it may also influence democratic
consolidation, the term used to refer to the process of systemic stabilization by
“securing achieved levels of democratic rule against authoritarian regression” (Schedler
1998, 103). There are two versions of this claim. One line argues that oil contributes to
democratic breakdown of nascent democracies. Another line claims that oil erodes
existing democratic norms and institutions, without necessarily leading to democratic
breakdown. Some studies show that democracies in oil states are more likely than
democracies in other states to fail (Fish and Wittenberg 2009; Jensen and Wantchekon
2004 [based on African data]; Wantchekon 2002). Analyzing the case of Venezuela,
Buxton (1999) argues that oil contributed to the institutional decay and the eventual
“deconsolidation” of democracy in Venezuela in the 1990s.
A softer version of this argument asserts that oil contributes to the erosion of
democratic institutions through rent-seeking and corruption (see Karl and Gary 2004
[on Venezuela]; Fish 2005 [on Russia]). Jensen and Wantchekon (2004) contend that
natural resources make a difference for the propensity of African countries to sustain a
democratic regime. Africa’s resource-rich democracies were more likely than resource-
poor democracies to experience a democratic breakdown. As Jensen and Wantchekon
(2004, 836) noted, “[a]fter the initial wave of democratization, countries with higher
55
levels of natural resource dependence experienced a backslide toward authoritarian
rule”. In a statistical analysis, Fish and Wittenberg (2009) find that fuels dependence is
bad for successful democratization, highlighting the fact that in six out of the 20 cases
of failed democratization (Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon, Kuwait, Nigeria, Russia, and
Venezuela) oil and gas account for more than half of total exports. This allows them to
conclude that “[d]emocracy knows no greater foe than oil” (Fish and Wittenberg 2009,
255). Treisman (2010) finds no significant impact of oil on the democratic erosion in
the case of Russia under Vladimir Putin while Gurses (2011) finds a positive
relationship between oil and democratic consolidation.
Evidence from Latin American countries seems to be mixed which leads
specialists to formulate somewhat contradictory views on the impact of oil on
democratization in that region. For example, Karl argues that oil promoted elite pact-
making in Venezuela. This promoted consensus among key democratic forces and led to
the democratic transition in 1958 (the Pact of Punto Fijo) following the fall of the
dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez (Karl 1997; also see Karl 1987). However, Karl
also argued oil wealth creates special challenges for democratization in general and that
oil is responsible for the crisis of the Venezuelan democracy. She notes: “In the rare
cases where some type of electoral democracy is actually established, reliance on oil
rents as the chief source of the state’s livelihood is likely to produce defective
democracies like Venezuela’s restricted partiocracy” (Karl 2008, 3).
2.4.6. Effects on regime stability A number of works within the second wave focus on the impact of oil on regime
stability rather than regime type or democratization. Oil is a source of potential
exogenous shocks. Periods of oil booms, as for example in the 1970s, are followed by
periods of oil busts, as in the 1980s. Such fiscal volatility is the source of potential
economic crisis and is believed to affect the stability of regimes of oil exporters. Some
scholars argued that even though oil contributes to regime stability during good times, it
has a destabilizing effect on political regimes during bad times (Karl 1997; Chaudhry
1997). Karl’s study (1997) shows, for example, that oil destabilized (authoritarian)
political regimes in oil-rich countries such as Iran, Algeria, and Nigeria.
Recent studies do not find support for the claim about the uniformly
destabilizing role of oil rents. Smith (2004) investigates regime longevity specifically
56
with respect to oil-induced exogenous shocks. His findings indicate that oil regimes are
more stable than it was previously assumed. In a similar vein, Morrison (2009) finds
that oil rents tend to stabilize regimes, both democracies and autocracies. He argues that
the stabilizing effect is due to two separate mechanisms related to redistributional
conflict in society: in democracies, increase in oil revenues (or any source of nontax
revenues) is linked to less taxation of elites while in authoritarian regimes more windfall
rents allow rulers to increase their social spending.
But what can explain the tendency for oil to promote authoritarian durability?
One view is that as the kind of “manna from heaven” oil rents can be easily used by
leaders to buttress their incumbency advantages (Jensen and Wantchekon 2004). Oil
exports generate valuable fiscal revenues for the state derived externally with little input
from domestic productive activities.
From another perspective, a country’s reliance on oil revenues exposes its
economy to inflationary effects, Dutch disease and external shocks due to oil price
volatility (Gelb 1988). During boom periods, the influx of massive foreign exchange
generates the Dutch disease effects with negative ramifications for the entire economy.
The booming oil sector in this account leads to the influx of foreign exchange into the
domestic economy. This causes the appreciation of the real exchange rate and stimulates
inflationary pressures. Currency appreciation raises the cost of exports of products from
domestic (traded) manufacturing and other industries producing the “crowding out”
effect. As a consequence, export-oriented manufacturing and agricultural sectors
become less competitive (Corden 1984).
Moreover, fluctuations in the world oil price make oil rents a highly volatile
source of fiscal revenue for the state and a cause of economic crisis. As Ahrend (2006,
8) explains, “crises in emerging market economies are most commonly caused by large
terms-of-trade shocks arising from sharp falls in the prices of countries’ main export
commodities”. During bust periods, falling prices lead to fiscal shortage and require
difficult financial adjustments to adopted public expenditure programs. In addition, all
oil exporters also face the challenge of transitioning to alternative, non-resource bases
for economic development (Mitchell and Stevens 2008).
It is the second view that presents something of a puzzle. Inflation, price hikes,
Dutch disease and other problems associated with oil rents are all possible causes of
57
economic crisis (Smith 2007). Studies have shown that he economic crisis is one of the
main predictors of regime change and authoritarian regimes are arguably more
vulnerable than democracies (Gasiorowski 1995; Haggard and Kaufman 1995; Geddes
1999; Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003).
Yet cross-country evidence suggests the opposite: oil is associated with a
reduced risk of authoritarian breakdown (Smith 2007). In other words, oil tends to
promote authoritarian durability, and volatility seems to have no significant impact.
Contrary to the theoretical prediction of scholars such as Luciani, the economic crises
associated with oil booms and busts in the 1970s and 1980s did not lead to the collapse
of regimes in oil-dependent states.
This is puzzling. As Smith (2007, 36) put it, “the oil-exporting world is home to
some of the most durable autocracies in modern history, and we lack an explanation for
why that is so”. One explanation is that patronage spending and repression are the key
instruments in dictators’ hands (Ross 2001). Oil revenues can be used by rulers to
increase public spending or invested in repressive apparatuses. Increased spending on
patronage and security forces allows authoritarian leaders to dampen societal pressures
on the regime to liberalize. This also provides leaders with enough resources to appease
potential elite opponents. Rulers with access to oil revenue do not depend on the
domestic productive economy, and therefore they are less constrained in restricting the
provision of public goods (such as free media, transparency, and civic liberties) that
enhance the ability of societal groups to coordinate (Bueno de Mesquita and Smith
2010).
A second explanation draws on a (historical) institutionalist perspective that
regimes with stronger political institutions, such as state bureaucratic apparatuses and
dominant parties, are better able to manage and survive economic/political crises. Smith
argues that oil rents can contribute to regime stability even during bad times as rulers
can use oil revenues acquired during boom periods to strengthen the political
institutions and their support coalitions. This helps them survive during bust periods
(Smith 2004). The key explanatory factor is the timing of regime consolidation relative
to the onset of oil boom. In this view, the robustness of regimes is determined by a set
of antecedent historical conditions that influenced the processes of coalition-building
and political institutionalization. Regimes are more robust if at the time of consolidation
58
they did not have access to windfall rents and faced strong organized opposition. During
the booming years these institutionally consolidated regimes reinvested oil resources in
state and party institutionalization. Increased state capacity lowered the exposure of this
group of regimes to exogenous shocks.
A third explanation points to the importance of leader incentives and choices.
The most significant challenge that all resource-dependent states have to address is how
to deal with the volatility in state fiscal revenue. During the boom period, the inflow of
windfall revenue can generate the Dutch disease effects. During the bust period,
revenues decline making the government reduce public spending. Both boom and bust
can potentially cause an economic crisis which in turn may trigger a political crisis.
Diversifying the economy can reduce the exposure of oil states to exogenous shocks,
and it seems rational for leaders to pursue diversification. Diversifying away resource
dependence can also improve the sustainability of economic performance contributing
positively to regime legitimacy. Yet, diversification may be dangerous as it implies that
rulers have to concede economic (and potentially also political) autonomy to non-state,
private elites. Therefore, if regimes are confronted with strong opposition to their rule
and have no viable non-resource sectors, there will be very little incentive for leaders to
diversify the economy (Dunning 2005).
Table 2.2. Oil and regime stability: Summary of causal mechanisms
Mechanism Outcome Author
Weak state
(rentier state)
Fragile authoritarian regime
(= Instability)
Karl 1997
Weak state and shallow ruling party
coalition
(coincides with oil boom)
Instability Smith 2007
More patronage/ social spending
Stable authoritarian regime
(= Stability)
Ross 2001, 2009
More repression
Stability Ross 2001
59
Strong state and ruling party coalition
(before oil)
Stability Smith 2007
(Non)Diversification strategies
(depending on strength of societal
opposition is and presence of alternative
sectors)
Stability/Change Dunning 2005
Source: author’s compilation
In fact, rulers can employ resource non-diversification as a political strategy to thwart
the empowerment of political opposition to their rule. As long as opposition is kept
weak, regimes can endure for long periods of time. In sum, leaders want to promote
economic development (as it raises their economic returns) but they will not adopt
growth-promoting policies it if they feel their incumbency is threatened. As Acemoglu
and Robinson (2006, 115) put it: “political elites will block beneficial economic and
institutional change when they are afraid that these changes will destabilize the existing
system and make it more likely that they will lose political power and future rents”.
Table 2.2 summarizes this discussion about causal links.
2.5. Third generation: Conditional theories
The third wave emerged in reaction to the structural determinism prevailing in the
resource curse literature. Speaking of the determinism, Herb (1999, 257) gives an
example that when it comes to explaining the lack of democracy in the Middle East “oil
is proffered as the culprit, ‘no representation without taxation’ cited as the mechanism,
and the matter is closed.” Recent research emphasizes the importance of other factors
that can mediate the effects of oil. They show that the effects of resource dependence
are heterogeneous and conditional, that is, they vary depending on specific
circumstances, sequencing of processes or country-specific conditions.
Scholars of conditional theories agree that oil has an impact on the political and
economic outcomes. However, they argue that the direction of this impact is conditional
and contingent upon other important factors. They highlight the following variables as
the crucial mediators: the quality of institutions, ownership structure, leader choices,
social inequality, critical junctures and path-dependency, incumbents’ incentives, and
the country context in general.
60
Mehlum and coauthors (2006), for example, argue that the crucial factor is the
quality of institutions. They distinguish between “producer friendly” and “grabber
friendly” institutions with the latter encompassing weak rule of law, malfunctioning
bureaucracy, and corruption. The quality of institutions “determines whether natural
resource abundance is a blessing or a curse” (Mehlum et al. 2006, 1119). Similarly,
Robinson and collaborators (2006) argue that the impact of resource booms depends
critically on the quality of political institutions because the institutions affect the choice
of policies:
“Low quality institutions [based on political clientelism] invite bad policy choices since they allow politicians to engage in inefficient redistribution in order to influence the outcomes of elections. High quality institutions [that promote accountability and bureaucratic competence] make such political strategies infeasible or relatively unattractive” (Robinson et al. 2006, 465). Jones Luong and Weinthal (2006, 2010) contend that the key link between
resources and the negative outcomes is the ownership structure and control over mineral
resources. As they point out, “the negative outcomes widely associated with resource
wealth should instead be attributed to the pathologies associated with state ownership”
(Jones Luong and Weinthal 2006, 246).
Dunning (2005) argues that resource dependence can affect political stability
depending on the leaders’ incentives as they face a tradeoff between diversifying the
economy and the political risks associated with implementing diversification. Oil
wealth presents a peculiar dilemma for autocrats. Oil revenue is a highly unstable
source of fiscal revenue, and leaders would prefer to diversify the economy to reduce
their reliance on such a volatile source of income. The dilemma is, however, that
diversification is politically risky. A diversified economy can create conditions for the
development of alternative sources of power and autonomous elites, who may use their
newly acquired wealth to overthrow the regime (Dunning 2005). The regime of Mobutu
Sese Seko in Zaire illustrates this dilemma quite vividly. Although being aware of the
need and benefits of diversifying the economy, Mobutu was reluctant to carry out
diversification of the Zairian mineral exports-based economy – and even made attempts
to de-diversify it – due to his fears that diversification can augment oppositional
strength to his kleptocratic rule. Thus, to use the famous phrase by Bueno de Mesquito
61
et al. (2003), even though nondiversification seems to be a bad policy, it can be good
politics, at least for some dictators.
Reflecting on the findings of the recent work, which has challenged the
conventional view of the resource curse, and drawing on especially the Latin American
experience, Dunning (2005; 2008; 2009) proposes a conditional theory of the resource
curse to account for “significant heterogeneity in the causal effects of natural resource
endowments in different institutional settings” (2009, 20). He argues that “natural
resource wealth can have both authoritarian and democratic effects: resources have a
conditional impact on the political regime” (2008, 107). In his account, “resource rents
can promote authoritarianism or democracy, but they do so through different
mechanisms” (2008, 4). Whether oil promotes authoritarianism or democracy depends
in large part on the pattern of wealth distribution in a given society. In Latin America,
natural resource wealth helped democracy (Dunning 2008; 2009). Oil’s impact depends
on two other structural factors, namely, the extent of inequality and the degree of
resource dependence. He argues that resource rents make redistributional conflict in
society less important, especially if the level of social inequality is high (as in Latin
America), which reduces the incentives of elites to block democratization.
A theory of regime stability developed by Smith (2007) explains that the effect
of oil wealth on regime stability is heterogeneous: depending on the timing of oil’s
entry into a country’s political economy and the initiation of “late development”, oil
wealth may either weaken or strengthen the state capacity and, as a consequence, either
decrease or increase regime durability. Since oil is “always potentially a sizable political
resource that can be skillfully wielded by politicians”, eventually its effect on regime
longevity depends on how rulers “incorporate it into the domestic political economy”
(Smith 2007, 7). Smith argues that oil rents can contribute to regime stability even in
bad times as rulers can use oil revenues acquired during boom periods to strengthen the
political institutions and their support coalitions, the strategy that helps them survive
during bust periods (Smith 2004). Lowi (2009) argues that leadership choices at critical
junctures – at the inception of oil-based development and during the economic shocks –
are the most significant factor in explaining regime stability: “At those junctures, the
leadership makes momentous decisions about how to distribute resources. In this way, it
(re-)defines the shape of political institutions and impacts outcomes” (Lowi 2009, 15).
62
Basedau (2005), in turn, highlights the importance of the broader, context-
specific variables. In his view, an ideal contextual analysis would take into account such
variables as the general socio-economic and political context, plus the factors relevant
to resource production and revenue management, and the complex interaction of all
these factors. Wright (2008) finds that the source of government revenue affects the
choice of institutions in authoritarian regimes. The sources of “unearned revenue”
induce personal rule, a type of authoritarianism with most challenging environment for
democratization.
Conditional theory considers oil’s effects to vary depending on specific
circumstances, sequencing of processes or country-specific conditions. This approach
strengthens the view that an understanding of the effects of oil rents requires more
attention to the domestic context (Basedau 2005) and elite choices within time- and
country-specific situational constraints.
2.6. Conclusion
In this chapter, I provided an overview of the rentier state and resource curse literatures.
There is by now substantial evidence, both case-study and large-N, that oil promotes
authoritarian rule by impeding democratic transitions and helping authoritarian regime
and their leaders to cling on to power. Although most scholars agree that oil promotes
authoritarianism (under certain conditions), there seems to be little consensus on how
exactly oil is linked to durable authoritarian rule. In the existing research on the political
dimension of the resource curse, there are two fundamental problems impeding our
ability to uncover the causal links between oil and authoritarian durability: the
assumption of unit homogeneity and the expectation of common causal mechanisms.
These problems arise, at least in part, because large-N analyses that dominate much of
the resource curse research and rest on the correlational logic are not concerned with
specifying the causal chain connecting oil to authoritarian rule. The mechanism-based
approach is increasingly being contrasted to the more common variable-oriented
analysis (see, e.g., McAdam et al. 2008).
Unit heterogeneity / homogeneity refers to “whether the same variable has
different effects in different subsets of the data” (Tarrow 2007, 589). Unit homogeneity
is a problem familiar to students of civil war. The first wave of civil war research,
which was based on correlational analyses, assumed that different types of civil war
63
(such as ethnic versus nonethnic) were driven by similar causes. Researchers simply
assumed their unit of analysis, civil war, to be a homogenous category (Sambanis 2001,
2003, 2004). As Sambanis (2004, 260) put it, “It is accepted practice in the literature to
pool events of civil war without exploring whether, in fact, they all result from the same
causal process”.
Like the earlier civil war literature, the current research on oil and authoritarian
rule also suffers from the implicit assumption of unit homogeneity. Most studies
consider the type of pre-existing authoritarian regime to be irrelevant without subjecting
this assumption to empirical verification. There is good theoretical reason, however, to
believe that the type of authoritarian regime might matter. Scholars of authoritarianism
have long argued against the homogenizing understanding of authoritarianism and
argued that different types of authoritarian regimes (differences in their “political
architecture”) have different sources of strengths and vulnerabilities (see e.g. Linz and
Stepan 1996; Bratton and van De Walle 1997; Geddes 1999).8
The assumption about unit homogeneity has implications for the way
researchers approach the specification of the causal mechanisms. The common
expectation is that the causal mechanisms must be similar across types of authoritarian
regimes. However, differences in the mode of authoritarian governance might entail
different causal mechanisms. Therefore, it might be helpful to look more closely at the
institutional setup of pre-existing authoritarian regimes.
There is consensus in the literature that the specification of causal mechanisms
is crucial. As in other studies based on correlational analysis, the causal process in the
political resource curse remains largely the “black box”. It has been recognized that the
resource curse literature has largely failed to specify a set of plausible causal
mechanisms.
The causal mechanisms proposed by various authors can be usefully divided
into two broad categories: demand-side effects and supply-side effects (Ulfelder 2007,
997-998; Karl 2004). Both sets of explanations borrow from the rentier state theory
discussed above. Explanations focusing on the demand side emphasize the way in
which resource-reliant states collect revenues, and how state reliance on unearned
revenues depresses popular pressures for government accountability. Supply-side 8 The term “political architecture” refers to the rules that “determine how the leadership of a state is configured and how state authority is exercised” (MacIntyre 2003, 1).
64
explanations focus on the ways rulers use and allocate resource revenues so that to stifle
opposition and other domestic pressures for democratization. Windfall revenues afford
rulers a variety of possibilities they can use to ensure loyalty and strengthen state
repressive capacity including use of greater patronage spending and increased
expenditures on the security apparatus. Loyalty and repression are the two primary tools
for dictators to maintain power, according to Wintrobe (1990). Because energy is a
strategically important resource, oil-rich rulers also enjoy foreign support (Bellin 2004).
To summarize, oil wealth relieves oil-rich government from the need to tax the
population. Huge oil revenues supply government with the financial and other resources
that can be spent to buy off opponents, ensure loyalty and resist (if needed, by coercion)
calls for democratization. Boix (2003) proposes an alternative causal link: since oil
wealth is an immobile type of assets and cannot be moved abroad wealthy elites will
resist democratization because of the fear to lose their immobile assets. Acemoglu and
Robinson (2006) also suggest that asset (im)mobility can explain why the incumbent
elites of oil-rich states oppose democratization.
However, the rentier state theory and other theories based on the rentier state
model have several shortcomings. Economic determinism is the main limitation. By
casting the relationship between oil and regime type in highly structuralist terms, these
theories fail to account for intermediary processes in the causal explanation. For
example, it is reasonable to ask: How exactly lower taxation translates into less
demands for representation? How do governments of oil states actually buy loyalty?
What kinds of institutions are involved in this process?
The rentier state theory points out several important structural factors, such as
the external source of rents (rather than domestic taxation), government fiscal
autonomy, state ownership of the petroleum industry, and the expenditure of revenues.
However, what is missing from rentier state theory is a description of how these
variables operate within domestic political systems of oil states.
Furthermore, by focusing on the structure of the economy as well as the patterns
of government finances and spending, the political economy framework derived from
the theory of the rentier state prioritizes economic factors in explaining the relationship
between oil and authoritarianism. Therefore, in spite of its name, the political economy
approach has largely ignored the political part (Okruhlik 1999, 286). Evidence from
65
case studies suggests that in some countries the influx of oil revenues exerts negative
effects on the institutional development of the state by encouraging rent-seeking and
corruption among politicians. However, as several recent works indicate (e.g. Smith
2007), such processes never occur in the political vacuum. Rather, in the path-
dependent way, oil revenues enter different political-economic environments, which by
the time of the arrival of oil windfalls normally have been shaped by other powerful
forces. Therefore, to understand how and why oil promotes authoritarian rule, it is
necessary to consider the role of political contexts by looking at how oil revenues are
filtered through and by the existing domestic political environments (Smith 2007;
Basedau 2005). The task of identifying the causal mechanisms begins with studying
how political institutions interact with oil revenues and how this interaction influences
the relationship between resource dependence and authoritarian persistence. Basedau
(2005), for instance, proposes a useful analytical framework to study the resource curse
which takes into account two kinds of contextual variables: a number of country-
specific socio-economic and political conditions and the characteristics of the resource
industry. Focusing on the political context seems particularly promising.
The identity of authoritarian regimes, with their diverse institutional
configurations and other important characteristics, has been taken for granted. Despite
the growing recognition that the “context matters” (Basedau 2005; Smith 2007), most
studies assume that the regime structure is either neutral or irrelevant for the
authoritarian resource curse. Because of this lack of attention to the variation among
authoritarian systems, the rentier state theory has failed to present a theory of a causal
process linking oil and persistent authoritarian rule.
One way to address the problem of causal mechanisms (the “how” of the
political resource curse) is to examine more carefully the mode of governance in
different authoritarian regimes. Remarkably little research has examined how oil affects
political outcomes across different types of authoritarian regimes.
66
Chapter 3. Oil and Personalism: Cross-country Evidence
3.1. Introduction Previous research has shown that differences in authoritarian structure have important
implications for the ways authoritarian regimes break down and the prospects of their
democratization. As discussed above, military regimes have a high frequency of regime
changes and a shorter lifespan than single party and personalist regimes. Personalist
regimes are the second, after single-party, most stable type of authoritarianism (Geddes
1999). Some historical cases of personalism were remarkably durable (Remmer
1989a/b; Snyder 1998, 62-67), the findings that invalidated earlier beliefs in the
inherent instability of personal rule (see, for example, Huntington 1968, 1-24). In
personalist regimes, democratic transition and immediate democratization are typically
difficult to achieve (Snyder 1992; Linz and Stepan 1996; Bratton and van de Walle
1997). In contrast to more corporate and bureaucratized forms of authoritarianism,
neopatrimonial dictatorships tend to be more susceptible to revolutionary and other
violent means of overthrow (Goodwin and Skocpol 1989; Goodwin 2001). Political
openings in personalist regimes are normally driven by popular protest, rather than elite
splits (Bratton and van de Walle 1997). But even after they collapse, neopatrimonial
regimes are most likely to be replaced by other types of nondemocratic rule (Huntington
1991-92; Linz and Stepan 1996). Personalist leaders are highly unlikely to give up
power voluntarily; they have to be forced out of power (Geddes 1999; Huntington
1991). In sultanistic dictatorships, democratic transitions are “complicated by the
weakness of political parties and other institutions” (Huntington 1991, 121).
Alongside the effects on regime change, personal rule is associated with a set of
negative economic outcomes, high levels of corruption, and poor governance (Jackson
and Rosberg 1982; Sandbrook 1985; Chehabi and Linz 1998, 21-23; van de Walle
2001; Chang and Golden 2010).
Scholars believe that different authoritarian systems have distinct functional
logics built into their political architecture as well as their own strategies of maintaining
power and resisting both domestic and external pressures for democratization. This
functional-institutional heterogeneity implies different sets of vulnerabilities for
different kinds of authoritarian regimes. In short, authoritarian survival is endogenous to
the authoritarian regime type. An influential tradition in the study of regime change
67
takes the kind of prevailing authoritarian regime as the starting point/framework in
explaining success or failure of democratization; the classic exemplars of such work are
Linz and Stepan (1996), Bratton and van de Walle (1997), and Geddes (1999). The idea
that differences in the structure of authoritarian regimes have implications for regime
change (survival) seems relevant for the study of the oil’s effects on regime survival. It
might be that there exist different ways in which authoritarian structure and oil interact
and that the interaction between these two influences regime longevity and
democratization in systematically different way. A corollary of this logical proposition
is that there might be different causal processes and mechanisms that link oil to the
political regime.
To summarize, scholars generally agree that the concept “authoritarian regime”
has become too broad to be analytically useful. Authoritarian regimes differ from each
other in important ways. Their differences include the following basic features: the
identity of rulers; how much decision-making power the ruler has and whether there are
institutions that constrain his authority and behavior; what institutional structures the
ruler relies on in exercising authority and how these institutions structure the
interactions between the ruler and the elites.
3.2. Hypotheses
This study is based on two assumptions. First, leaders of oil states, like those in other
states, are rational actors and as such are power maximizers; they will make choices that
enhance their authority and ensure their incumbency. As Waldner (2003) pointed out,
leaders normally make choices under constraints posed by resource scarcity. For oil
states, however, this is not the case since oil rents “increase choice sets rather than
constraining them: they are permissive variables which make more things possible.
Needed, then, is intense emphasis on decision-making logics and contexts” (Waldner
2003, 8).
What are those decision-making logics and contexts, and how can we identify
them? In answering this question, I present an argument based on the new institutional
approach to authoritarian politics. The new institutionalism of authoritarianism
(Schedler 2009) contends that institutions matter in authoritarian regimes even though
their primary function might be to “preserve the power, prestige, privileges, and
68
importantly, distributional advantage of the dominant elite and its allies at the expense
of society” (Cook 2007, 6).
I show that the authoritarian effects of oil windfalls on a country’s regime
should be seen in the context of the formal and informal institutions that constitute that
country’s authoritarian regime. It is well known that authoritarian regimes rely on
different sets of institutions that both constrain and enable the behavior of their leaders.
In the institutional model of authoritarian decision-making, leaders’ preferences can be
derived from the institutional logics of their regimes. More specifically, the preferences
of leaders of party-based regimes – who must take into account the organizational
interests and preferences of the party – may not be the same as those of leaders of
personalist regimes – whose all-powerful rulers are concerned more about satisfying
much more narrow interests of their own and the small elite they build around them.
Wintrobe (1998, 11) labels such narrow interest-driven regimes the “tinpot” regimes in
which the government uses only moderate repression to stay in power and “collect the
fruits of monopolizing political power (Mercedes Benzes, palaces, Swiss banks
accounts, and so on)”.
Authoritarian institutions structure the behavior of politicians in authoritarian
regimes. The allocation of revenues by the incumbent leader might depend on the rules
of the political game. The structure of authoritarian regime, that is the rules that govern
decision-making and exercise of power, can play a crucial role in the authoritarian
resource curse. Is the ruler a single veto player or are there other important
actors/institutions whose agreement or support is required for a policy to be adopted?
Who is the ruler – one person, the political party, the military or the royal family? Who
carries out policies – the party organs, the state bureaucracy, or the neopatrimonial
apparatus (permeated by the ruler’s patronage network)?
Oil rents are a stock of resources and as such cannot exert any effects
independent of actors. It is the leaders of oil-based regimes who make decisions about
spending oil revenues, and, as noted above, we can assume that they care only about
power and incumbency. However, authoritarian regimes are not institutional vacuums
nor are they identical in the “institutional designs” or constitutions, which following
Roeder (1993, 6), can be defined as “a polity’s most fundamental rules (whether written
or not) defining political roles and relationships”. Authoritarian constitutions vary in at
69
least two important respects: the extent of institutionalization of their leadership and the
type of state bureaucratic structure. These institutional differences affect what leaders
do (and can do) with oil rents. To put it differently, the type of institutional design /
authoritarian constitution entails the modus operandi of authoritarian regimes. For
example, in regimes run by an ideologically coherent dominant political party, the
leadership’s decision-making on where to allocate revenues will be more constrained by
considerations of maintaining party hegemony. In military regimes, revenue spending
will be guided by the preference of the officer corps to maintain corporate coherence
and the role of the military forces will be seen as relatively more important. In
personalist regimes, policy-making will be much less constrained and extremely
discretionary, in the first place, which will allow the leader a greater opportunity, than
in other types of regimes, to keep revenues under his private, personal control while
expenditure will be driven by the need to sustain the circle of strategic allies (the top
echelons of the patron-client network). In monarchies, political kinship constitutes the
central institutional core whereby the ruler appoints family members to top bureaucratic
positions (Crystal 1990). Shared kin-based solidarity ensures regime continuity. The
monarch, who is somewhat more constrained than the personalist dictator, will be
guided by the need to look after his political kinship network.
It is therefore plausible that institutional contexts induce certain logics that can
help us explain why politicians act the way they do in different institutional
environments. This suggests there can exist distinct but predictable causal mechanisms
connecting oil windfalls to persistent authoritarianism. The proposition that there can be
different causal mechanisms depending on the contextual institutional variation is not
meant to imply, however, that “the influence of resource rents differ per case and per
country” (Werger 2009, 25), but merely to suggest that there can be distinct yet
regularized patterns of causal processes intrinsically linked to the institutional
characteristics of different kinds of nondemocratic regimes.
In a recent paper, Anderson and Ross (2011) pointed out that “the most credible
version of the resource curse is conditional on the initial regime type of the affected
country” (emphasis added). Wiens (2014, 198) notes that extant theoretical models tend
to treat institutions as exogenous and “rarely consider the ways in which resource rents
affect the determinants underlying the nature of the institutional environment itself”.
70
These new arguments highlight the important role that institutional characteristics can
play in the political resource curse.
Personal rule might provide a particularly conducive environment for the
authoritarian oil curse. The following conditions can facilitate the pro-authoritarian
effects of oil in personalist autocracies. Four factors are the properties of personal rule;
the fifth one pertains to the economic setting typical of personal rule. All of these
mechanisms should be seen as inter-related and complementary. The four regime
properties and the specific condition are the following: First, the leader’s unconstrained,
centralized and discretionary powers, both official and informal, as well as related
policy flexibility; the ruler’s control (“capture”) of the state bureaucracy and its
penetration by the ruler’s patronage network; characteristics of systemic clientelism and
rewards in exchange for loyalty; small winning coalition size and resource stockpiling
mechanism, and, finally, the broader condition is the absence of independent private
elites and their discouragement by the ruler’s dislike of autonomous economic
activities.
First, the principal mechanism is related to the concentration and centralization
of political power literally in the hands of only one man. Personal rule is distinct in
presenting such “advantage” to its ruler. Under conditions of virtually non-existent
checks and balances, discretion enjoyed by the ruler is enormous which opens up many
opportunities for the use of oil rents for the purposes of political survival. Weak rule of
law as well as weak accountability institutions confer “hyper-incumbency advantages”
(Greene 2007) to the chief executive (Wantchekon 2002). The executive discretion
gives the ruler maximum control of policy process, especially of resource allocation.
The absence of constraints means that the leader can enjoy policy flexibility which
typically translates into ad hoc discretionary policy-making as to both the content (on
what to spend) and target groups (who will benefit) of policies. Perhaps counter-
intuitively, such “erratic” policy-making, if employed skillfully, can contribute to
regime durability. As one study shows, the weaker the constraints on leaders, the more
they can affect policy: “leaders matter, but only in settings where other institutions are
weak” (Jones and Olken 2005, 840). Thus, discretionary control of revenues is perhaps
the single most important condition for the survival of oil-based personalist regimes.
71
Second, the personalist ruler controls appointments to key public administrative
positions in the state and can use this strategic patronage (especially ministerial
appointments) as a “coup-proofing” strategy to buy off potential rivals inside the elite
(see Arriola 2009). Oil revenues provide substantial resources allowing the expansion of
the state bureaucratic sector. A tendency of leaders of oil states to expand the public
sector and elevate the role of the state in the economy was first noted by Mahdavy
(1970). He observed that with increase in oil revenues “the government becomes an
important – or even the dominant – factor in the economy” (Mahdavy 1970, 432).
Neopatrimonial state, thus, serves as an important channel for distributing patronage
and securing support of elites.
Third, the ruler-centered patronage network, typically consisting of a narrow
circle of family members, friends and cronies, is another attribute of personalist regimes
which also presents a number of advantages. It allows the ruler to manage intra-elite
power relations through informal channels and to distribute largess bypassing
accountability controls. Research shows that systems based on the patronage network, if
relatively more centralized and institutionalized, can be stable. According to Le Billon
(2003, 415), for example, “the corruption of politics through a system of patron-client
relationships guided by private interests can ensure some degree of political stability
due to the prevalence of reciprocity among political actors” (also see Charap and Harp
2009).
Fourth, personalist regimes have small winning coalitions. Having a small
winning coalition has its benefits too. Most important, it enables the ruler to stockpile
resources. When the winning coalition is large the ruler has to share a large portion of
the available resources to maintain the loyalty of his supporters (Bueno de Mesquita et
al. 2003). Pickering and Kisangani (2010) extend this logic further to suggest that
personalist leaders are able “to accumulate much larger stockpiles of the resources
necessary for political survival than leaders in single-party states”.
Finally, one notable condition made possible by personalist rule is the virtual
absence of truly independent “private” elites. Because of the particular sense of
insecurity, personalist rulers discourage and eliminate all pockets of autonomous
economic and political activity. As a result, the only elite that exists is the state elite;
there is no elite outside the circle surrounding the state (Dunning 2008). According to
72
Chaudhry (1989, 114): “Oil revenues breed large, fiscally autonomous distributive
states that undercut the development of political and economic institutions in the private
sector by displacing oil economic groups and creating new clients through state
spending”.
The broader condition implies that the economic elites have no sources of
wealth or power outside the leader’s network, so they have no other option but to keep
loyalty to the regime (there is no life outside the network). As Shambayati (1994, 309)
pointed out: “Under rentier conditions, loyalty to the system is the most rational course
of action for entrepreneurs. Instead of challenging the state, they will try to gain the
government’s favor by establishing patron-client ties with powerful individuals within
the state structure”. Absence of non-state elites and their deliberate discouragement and
elimination of any institutional pockets of autonomous power makes it especially
difficult to organize societal opposition to the regime and complicates intra-elite
coordination to challenge the ruler from within the elite (Franz and Ezrow 2011).
Personal rule is a difficult environment for opposition to emerge, organize, and
challenge the regime. In a more institutionalized environment, like the rule of FLN
(National Liberation Front) in Algeria, rent-seeking coalitions emerged within the party
to compete for their share of oil rents at the expenditure side (Chhibber 1996). Although
conflicting interests and rent-seeking coalitions can (and do) emerge in more
personalized regimes too, they lack the institutional mechanisms to coordinate and
cooperate among themselves, which exacerbates collective action problems within the
elite.
Different institutional structures of authoritarian rule constrain the behavior of
rent-seeking elite factions. In party-based regimes, various sections of the party or the
military representing different rent-seeking factions have horizontal institutional
channels to coordinate between each other and get their share of rents. This may
eventually empower the rent-seeking groups who may use their new power to depose
the ruler. During the oil boom of the 1970s, General Hugo Banzer, who was the military
ruler of Bolivia at that time, was ousted by his former allies in the military after seven
consecutive years of presidency (1971-1978). His leadership was considered the longest
tenure and a “record in modern Bolivian history” (Malloy 1991, 41). Under personal
rule, the extreme discretion enjoyed by the leader in allocating rents – his exclusive
73
personal control of access to rents and their disbursal – creates networks of personal
dependencies (vertical and radial) and, unlike party or military regimes, personalist
regimes provide no institutional channels of intra-elite coordination.
At the level of Geddes regime types it is difficult to see whether authoritarian
leaderships (not regimes) have a tendency to shift from collective leadership (several
individual veto players), if it existed before oil windfalls, towards a more directive
leadership with one individual veto player (personalist dictator or monarch), that is,
whether oil makes leadership more directive over time. Applying careful process-
tracing techniques can help. It must be noted here that the development of authoritarian institutions need to
be seen as a dynamic process. As Gilley and Holbig (2009, 358) observed “authoritarian
durability cannot be understood as simple perpetuation of a rigid set of authoritarian
institutions, but should be conceived of as a highly dynamic process of adaptation to
changing domestic and international environments”. Shifts within the leadership in one
or another direction are a constant possibility although institutional development always
occurs “in the context of existing institutions and previous institutional innovations”
(Cook 2007, 5). In Chile, Pinochet came to power as part of the military junta but later
sidelined other members of the junta to make decisions without consultation (Geddes
1999; Remmer 1989). Bermeo described the shift towards directive policy-making in
Greece under the rule of officers in the 1970s in contrast to the then prevailing view that
Greece matched the bureaucratic authoritarian model of Latin American dictatorships as
suggested by O’Donnell (1979) (see Bermeo 1995).
Oil wealth presents a peculiar dilemma for autocrats. Oil prices are determined
in the international markets and tend to be highly volatile. This makes oil income a very
unstable source of revenue, and ideally the leader would prefer to diversify the economy
to reduce the dependence on such volatile source of fiscal revenue. The dilemma is that
diversification is risky. A diversified economy can create conditions for the
development of alternative sources of power and autonomous elites, who may use their
wealth to dispose the ruler (Dunning 2005). That is why dictatorial rulers, such as
Mobutu Sese Seko, choose not to diversify their economies; in fact, they may even
pursue the policy of de-diversification (what Mobutu actually did with the Zairian
economy). Given their particularly heightened paranoia about their own insecurity,
74
personalist rulers are especially cautious about pursuing diversification, so they keep
their economies “single-track” for as long as natural resources are available. Thus, to
use the famous phrase by Bueno de Mesquito et al.’s (2003), even though non-
diversification seems to be a bad policy, it can be good politics for some authoritarian
leaders.
The personalist configuration of power with one individual veto player (as
opposed to other authoritarian configurations with one but collective veto player) allows
for maximum discretion over decision-making, which allows the leader to concentrate
so much power that “feeding” a small but loyal group of cronies is sufficient to hold on
power. Unlike institutional patronage (such as party machine), personalist patronage
requires very little institutional investment and a narrower circle of co-opted elites. This
allows the ruler to save more of oil wealth and “tap into” financial reserves in bad times.
Such institutional configuration, which is informally set up but also typically enshrined
in super-presidentialist formal constitution, is beneficial also because it allows the ruler
a great deal of policy flexibility as he adopts ad hoc “policy solutions” in response to
emergent challenges. Indeed, many of these policy innovations turn out to be policy
failures, which can explain why oil states, on average, perform worse than other states.
To summarize, authoritarian regimes can be distinguished by their institutional
configuration. Perhaps, the most crucial institutional difference lies in the institutional
rules about decision-making within the executive leadership. Roeder (1993, 7) argues
that the institutionalization of balancing within the collective leadership increases the
stability of a polity. Personalist regimes might display more continuity when they have
sources of oil rents. This may happen for several reasons, the most important one being
discretionary policy flexibility (MacIntyre 2003) which allows the ruler to respond to
challenges quickly by directing spending in the targeted but ad hoc manner. The
neopatrimonial structuring of the state apparatus and the reliance on patron-client
networks might be also important mechanisms. Finally, the small coalition size allows
the ruler to save revenues and spend them during bad times while the discouragement of
private non-state elites and the dominance of informal institutions prevents would-be
elite dissenters from emerging and organizing opposition to the regime.
It is worthwhile to briefly consider these differences here. The first key
institutional difference is the extent of power concentration (dispersion) in the executive
75
(MacIntyre 2003) and the distinction between collective and directive leadership
(Roeder 1993, 7). The latter is a dynamic dimension: power can shift towards either
institutionalized balancing within the collective leadership (the party bureau or the
junta) or towards the opposite end – one-man rule. Unlike in democracies with elaborate
institutional division of decision-making powers (between legislative and executive
branches, between houses of the parliament and so on), in authoritarian regimes policy-
making is in the hands of those who control the executive branch of the state – either the
political party, the military junta, the royal court, or just a single person. Legislatures
are typically rubber stamps while courts are not independent from the authoritarian
leadership, so normally they do not hold veto power9 – defined as “an individual or
collective actor that has the institutionalized power to defeat a proposed law by
withholding formal approval” (MacIntyre 2003, 37). Under collective leadership there
are rules and constraints that guide the executive. In party-based regimes, relevant
formal (codified) and informal institutions are a set of internal party rules; in military
juntas there are routinized pacts among members of the junta (MacIntyre 2003, 42).
While all of the authoritarian institutional frameworks concentrate decision-
making power – all are basically systems with a single veto player (Tsebelis 2002) –
more subtle differences do exist. The only two configurations of governmental powers
in which a veto player is an individual, not a collective actor, is personalist autocracy
and monarchy (in monarchies, the royal court plays a consultative role, therefore does
not have veto power). This is the form of the most extreme power concentration. The
higher the level of power concentration is the higher the risk of arbitrary decision-
making. As MacIntyre (2003, 21) noted: “An institutional division of decision-making
power helps reduce the risk of arbitrary policy action”. When a veto player is a
collective actor policy-making requires consent of other members of the decision-
making body; such consent is not required under personalist domination. A strong
coherent party or junta constrain the ruler entailing less policy discretion. These nuances
in rules governing decision-making can have important implications for policy-making
guiding access to oil rents and their allocation.
The second dimension – state organizational structure – is useful for separating
two kinds of state administrative apparatuses: 1) legal-rational bureaucratic, and 2)
9 But may perform other important functions for the regime, see, e.g. Blaydes (2010).
76
neopatrimonial. There are good reasons to incorporate this dimension in studies of
authoritarianism in general and the political resource curse in particular since much
works on the resource curse are concerned with oil’s effects on state institutions (Karl
1997) and differences in the “maturity” of state bureaucratic apparatuses can have
important implications for the effects of oil revenues. In general, the way the state is
organized and the extent of its bureaucratization is an important institutional check on
the power of the executive. However, not all countries develop an autonomous
bureaucratic apparatus at independence. Shefter (1994), for example, shows using the
experience of Western countries that the timing of bureaucratization relative to popular
mobilization influences the types of parties that emerged in Western Europe and the US.
Weakly bureaucratized state apparatuses allowed winning parties to use public
employment as a political tool for rewarding loyalists encouraging patronage parties to
emerge. More corporate and autonomous bureaucracies resist the use of patronage,
which promoted more programmatic parties. Polities that lack a strong state tradition are
vulnerable to state capture (Hellman et al. 2000) and predisposed to the use of
administrative resources by incumbents for their political / electoral advantage (Allina-
Pisano 2010). For the resource curse argument, the difference between bureaucratic and
neopatrimonial public administrations can be crucially important from the point of view
of creating ‘permissive environment’ for the incumbent leaders to disregard
bureaucratic norms in spending rents and also whether bureaucrats themselves have
developed sufficient immunity against abuse of public office.
In this chapter, I formulate and test hypotheses about the relationship between
oil, the type of authoritarianism, and regime stability. The types of authoritarian regime
represent different combinations of ruling coalition, institutional arrangements and
strategies of governance. These characteristics have systematically different effects on
authoritarian regime collapse (Geddes 1999). In the institutional model of authoritarian
politics, leaders’ preferences can be derived from the institutional logics of their
regimes. For example, the preferences of leaders in party-based regimes are shaped by
the need to maintain support of the party’s support constituency which typically
represents the interests of a broader cross-section of the population. In contrast,
personalist rulers are less constrained in their decision-making and rely on the support
of a much smaller elite circle.
77
According to Geddes (1999), in order to understand how authoritarian regimes
break down, we need to look at intra-elite interactions involving competition,
factionalism and rivalry. Most authoritarian transitions begin at the level of intra-elite
interactions. However, the institutional setting also matters as the relations between
factions are shaped by incentives that are inherent in the institutional rules and
procedures. Most important, these institutional differences determine the way in which
splits typically occur within authoritarian elites. Hence, differences in structural
characteristics of authoritarian regimes influence elite behavior and affect how and
when authoritarian regimes collapse. Table 3.1 below, taken from Geddes (1999),
shows that different types of authoritarian regimes have different duration prospects. In
the next pages, I consider how the variation in the interests and behavior of political
elites in military, personal, single party autocracies and monarchies might affect the
impact of oil on the survival of regimes.
In the game-theoretic model developed by Geddes (1999), elites in military
regimes fear internal splits the most. Typically, the army intervenes in politics if there is
a severe crisis that is deemed difficult to manage by conventional political means.
Table 3.1. Durability of different types of authoritarian regimes
Average length of
rule, in years
Regimes
surviving in 1999, %
Military
N
8.5
(32)
11.1%
Military personal
hybrids
9.8
(13)
13.3
Personal
15
(43)
17.3
Single party
hybrids
18.6
(14)
17,6
Single party
25.7
(21)
36.4
Triple hybrid
32.5
(2)
60
Source: Geddes 1999, 133
78
As a part of the state bureaucracy itself (Riggs 1993), the “military as an
institution” is interested in fixing a crisis situation and withdrawing from politics
afterwards. If factionalism within the elite intensifies, the military prefers to return to
the barracks because as a professional organization it fears to compromise its unity as
an institution that may be caused by splits and rivalries within its officer corps. This
explains why military regimes have the shortest lifespan of all autocracies; their average
age is about 8.5 years.
If we follow the logic of elite preferences in military regimes, it would seem
that the availability of oil revenues might affect elite behavior in this subset of
authoritarian regimes in the following way. High resource rents might intensify elite
splits, especially if elites were less coherent in the first instance, as various factions may
wish to get access to the spoils made available to them from abundant oil revenues. If
such risk emerges, oil wealth should accelerate the military’s exit from the political
scene since the military always prefers to withdraw from politics as it faces the
prospects of disunity.
In single party regimes, all actors are interested in regime continuity. Factions in
these regimes are better off if the party stays in power. This explains why party regimes
are the most durable of all authoritarian regimes; their average lifespan is about 26
years. How can oil influence the incentives and behavior of political elites given the
dominance of the single party? It is logical to assume that oil rents may have both
stabilizing and destabilizing effects. On the one hand, oil revenues may fuel internal
struggles over access to rents within the party leadership. Such behavior should
encourage elite factionalism which might lead to political instability. On the other hand,
oil revenues may be used by the party leadership to expand party rule within the society
and to enhance the party’s organizational capacity.
Research suggests that the effect of oil rents on party-based regimes depends on
party discipline, which refers to the extent of a party’s institutional and ideological
strength, and the timing of the onset of windfall revenue. Smith (2005) finds that rents
have a differential impact on the resilience of single-party regimes: they contribute to
durable party rule where parties had been strong before they got access to rents. That is
to say, rents strengthen party rule in regimes where parties had been consolidated; in
contrast, they weaken party rule in regimes where the consolidation coincided with
79
party-building. Based on this finding, Smith suggests that where access to rents
coincides with the process of party consolidation, parties will become “rent havens” and
party rule will be weak. Smith (2007) also claims that regimes in oil-rich states are more
stable than in oil-poor states because the former re-invest oil revenues in strengthening
the institutions of the state and reinforcing their support coalitions.
In personal autocracies, an individual leader dominates politics and policy-
making and rules with the help of the patronage network. Elites depend almost entirely
on benefits and privileges granted to them by the ruler, and their survival thus depends
on the survival of the regime as a whole. Personal autocracies last on average 15 years.
What is the potential role of oil in the sustenance of the personal subset of authoritarian
regimes? Van de Walle (1994) observes that oil wealth promoted “patrimonial
orientation” under Presidents Ahmadu Ahidjo (1960-82) and Paul Biya (1982-), thereby
promoting the authoritarian regime in Cameroon.
Chehabi and Linz (1998) also suggest that there might be a link between oil and
neopatrimonial (sultanistic) governance:
“Rentier states in which the regime is not bound by tradition (unlike the oil monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula) are thus more vulnerable to sultanization. Easily exploitable natural resources whose production is in the hands of one or only a few enterprises with high profits can provide the resources for such a regime, especially when elites are weak. Sugar, oil, and copper exemplify this, each in a different way (Chehabi and Linz 1998, 27). Personalist rulers govern by providing patronage to their supporters, therefore
more oil revenues means more resources available to buy the loyalty of the support
coalition. The patron-client network should be particularly vulnerable to any dramatic
exogenous economic shocks that could disrupt “the material underpinnings of regime
loyalty” (Geddes 1999, 122). Any material scarcity must have a markedly negative
effect on the stable functioning of the patronage network. Therefore, oil should be
critical for the maintenance of personal rule, and oil rents are expected to have a
positive, stabilizing effect on regimes based on personal rule.
Wright (2008) observes that different types of authoritarianism occur under
different conditions, and abundance in natural resources is one of the major factors that
can explain the variation in the form of authoritarian rule. He finds that the main
80
watershed is between personal and other kinds of authoritarian rule, and that personal
rule is more likely to emerge in countries with larger oil endowments, less domestic
investment, and smaller populations. He explains this finding by suggesting that
different types of authoritarian rule require different kinds of political economy in place,
and that personal autocracies and monarchies are more dependent on natural resource
revenue than military and single-party regimes (see in particular the table reporting the
mean values for potential sources of government revenue in authoritarian regimes;
2008, 324). Most importantly, Wright finds that personal autocracies are more likely
than other types of regimes to emerge in countries with more sources of “unearned”
income. In addition, he demonstrates that “larger oil reserves increase the likelihood of
personalist rule,” more specifically that “[i]ncreasing log (oil reserves) by one standard
deviation nearly doubles the probability of being a personalist regime (from 21% to
40%) and of being a monarchy (from 0.65% to 1.21%)” (Wright 2008, 325). Military
and single-party regimes are less likely in countries with larger sources of “unearned”
revenues such as petroleum. These findings are statistically significant and based on
testing a multinomial logit model with the type of authoritarian regime as the dependent
variable and controlling for GDP per capita, ethnic fractionalization and other standard
variables (Wright 2008, 326-327).
Finally, Wright suggests that personal rule occurs “under much different
conditions than single-party or military rule,” and “if natural resource dependence
impedes democratization as earlier research suggests … then this may be because
natural resource dependence breeds personalist authoritarian rule, but not necessarily
other forms of authoritarian rule” (Wright 2008, 325).
Acemoglu and his colleagues (2004) also argue that personal authoritarian
regimes (“kleptocracies”, as they call them) are more common in resource abundant
countries and that “greater natural resource rents facilitate kleptocracy” (2004, 166).
Similarly, Basedau (2005, 14) points out that natural resources can provide a “fertile
soil” for neopatrimonialism.
The persistence of monarchy in the oil-rich Gulf region has long been linked to
that region’s oil abundance (Stepan et al. 2014). Theories of the rentier state saw the
Gulf monarchies as the embodiment of the fiscally autonomous rentier state that can
distribute its plentiful income to their subjects to make them politically acquiescent.
81
Table 3.2. Predicted impact of oil and the type of authoritarianism
Type of authoritarianism Relevance of oil for
survival
Oil’s expected impact
on autocratic survival
Military low negative
Single party mixed negative / positive
Personal high positive
Monarchy high positive
The discussion above can be summarized in the form of the following hypotheses
(see Table 3.2):
• H1: Oil should be associated with less durable rule in military regimes (by
encouraging elite splits) and more durable rule in personalist regimes and
monarchies.
• H2: Impact of oil rents on regime survival in single party regimes is ambiguous
and probably depends on prior institutionalization of the ruling party.
• H3: Oil and personalism should be closely related. Oil should prolong the
length of personalist regimes.
• H4: Oil should make more difference for the survival probability and
democratization prospects of personalist regime rather than other types of rule
because personalist regimes are more dependent on oil rents and other sources
of “unearned” income.
• H5. Personalist regimes are expected to suffer more from the oil curse’s
democracy deficit, as personalism in general is particularly inimical to
democratization.
• H6. Oil should enhance the survival of mixed-personalist regimes for the same
reasons as for personal rule.
3.3. Some empirical evidence for the oil-personalism link
3.3.1. Methods and measures To analyze the data, I used descriptive statistical and survival analysis techniques. The
latter is used for estimating and comparing survivor functions (survival probabilities) of
82
two or more groups and evaluating the relationship of explanatory factors to survival
time (Kleinbaum and Klein 2005). Survival analysis techniques allow one to analyze
data involving time until an event occurs. An event is usually death or failure. Survival
analysis is advantageous over other statistical methods as it allows one to work with
incomplete data where, for example, subjects enter and leave the study at any point in
time within the study period. If cases do not have the end point, that would indicate that
an event of interest has occurred, they are considered “censored”. They can be censored
because of loss to follow-up or withdrawal from the study for the reasons other than that
of interest. I use the Kaplan-Meier (KM) method to estimate and compare survival
probabilities between groups.
In order to explore the hypotheses put forth in the previous section, I conducted
an analysis of oil and gas data and duration of various regimes using the statistical
method of survival analysis. Tables and figures below present summary statistics on
duration, regime breakdowns and graphs of KM plots in the two groups compared
(separated by their “exposure” to high oil rents) and across the type of authoritarianism..
The main findings confirm that autocracy is more likely to survive in personalist
regimes with oil than without oil. This is also true for party-based regimes. When the
outcome of interest is democratic transition, not regime collapse, within-country
comparison suggests that while party-based and military regimes in oil-producing states
had 7 and 9 transitions to democracy respectively, the probability of democratic
transition in personalist or monarchical autocracies was zero. Therefore, one can
conclude that one type of dictatorship that is indeed cursed by oil more than any other
type of regime is the personalist type of autocracy. Moreover, in one most prominent oil
state, namely Venezuela under Chávez, and also one of the two major oil producers that
was democratic for a substantial period of time that collapsed (the second such case is
Peru), the post-democratic regime that emerged was highly personalistic. This suggests
that oil not only promotes personalist autocracy but also affects the emergent regimes in
a post-democratic context like Venezuela’s under Chávez.
To test the claim that oil is connected to the structure of regime and their
interaction impacts the likelihood of democratization (the central proposition of the
“political resource curse” literature), I analyzed data gathered from two datasets. One
set of data comes from Geddes, Wright and Frantz (GWF data) updating and extending
83
the original autocratic regime coding by Geddes (1999).10 To overcome the problem of
a large number of hybrid regimes, the GWF data coders use the following rules of
aggregating or collapsing regime types:
- Party-based regimes = party-based, party-military, party-personal, party-
personal-military, oligarchy, Iran 1979-2010;
- Military regimes = indirect military, military, military-personal;
- Personalist regimes = personal;
- Monarchical regimes = monarchy.
For some analyses, I used a different set of coding rules to capture a separate
category of “mixed personalist” regimes. For this purposes, the following rules were
applied: party-based regimes were coded as “pure party”, any regime with the
personalist attribute (i.e. military-personal, party-personal and triple hybrids) were
coded as “mixed personalist”, and all non-mixed personalist cases were coded as “pure”
personal.
Cases were included in the dataset based on the following set of considerations.
First, Ross (2012) argues that oil became a curse only after 1970s. Before the oil
nationalizations in the 1960-70s, there was not much difference between oil producers
and non-oil states, as Ross’ (2012) study demonstrates. This suggests that oil curse is
limited by the scope conditions of time period (after 1970) and state ownership of oil.
Second, Geddes (2009) argues that the causes and mechanisms of democratization are
not uniform across time and differ systematically by the type of authoritarianism. She
suggests that there are differences between earlier democratic transitions and the later
wave of democratization. Given this, I limited my study to the post-1950 period. The
dataset excludes regimes that ceased to exist prior to 1950s, such as Nepal (1946-51).
This excludes all democracies that emerged during the first long wave in the late 19-
early 20th century. For example, it seems problematic to include countries like Norway
and Australia in the same group as Nigeria and Ecuador and expect that oil will
influence macro-political developments in two groups similarly (Karl 1997). Norway
had been a democracy since the late 19th century and had a set of mature and
consolidated democratic institutions by the time it experienced an oil boom in the
1970s. Neither the oil curse nor the rentier state literatures claims that oil rents would
10 Data and codebook are available at http://sites.psu.edu/dictators.
84
influence the regime trajectory of a highly consolidated democratic system. In short, my
study has two scope conditions: it applies only to the regimes in the developing world
and post-communist countries, and it only includes regimes that democratized after
World War II and over the course of the third wave of democratization or later.
There has been a longtime debate over the issue of measuring oil wealth or
resource dependence. Many previous measures used some indicator of oil or mineral
resource dependence. Common indicators include oil as a percentage of a country’s
GDP or fuel’s ratio to total exports. Previously, this was measured as the level of
resource intensity or resource dependence. High resource dependence connotes that
resource rents account for a significant fraction of government fiscal revenue (see e.g.
Dunning 2008). Following Ideally a measure of oil should be able to capture “oil
dependence” indicating that resource rents account for a significant fraction of
government fiscal revenue. This understanding of oil dependence comes closer to the
concepts of “rentierism” and the “rentier state” (Beblawi and Luciani 1987; Mahdavy
1970). Mahdavy (1970, 428) defines rentier states as “those countries that receive on a
regular basis substantial amounts of external rent”. The main idea of the authoritarian
resource curse literature is that oil promotes authoritarian rule. This is especially true for
states that not only have abundant reserves of oil and natural gas, but also are highly
dependent on the constant supply of petroleum rents (for this distinction, see Dunning
2008).
There are a number of problems with the conventional measures of “resource
dependence”. First, there is a problem that oil can be endogenous to GDP. Because less
developed countries tend to have smaller GDP, putting GDP in the denominator is
problematic. Second, poorer countries cannot consume much of their oil and therefore
are more likely to export most of oil they produce (Ross 2012). To avoid these
problems, it is now common to use an alternative measure of oil wealth -- oil income
per capita. This is not a perfect measure for fuel dependence, but is much easier to
calculate for greater number of countries, more accurate, and allows one to overcome
the common measurement problems. Following recent studies by Haber and Menaldo
(2011), Ross (2012), Wright et al. (2012), I use oil income per capita to measure “oil”.
Oil income dataset was taken from Ross (2013). Countries are divided into two groups:
oil producers and non-oil producers. A country is defined as an oil producer if it
85
produces at least a hundred U.S. dollars per capita from oil and gas sale in a given year
(Ross 2012). All other cases were coded as “non-oil”. This is computed based on the
formula: crude oil production multiplied by the price of crude oil divided by population
(Haber and Menaldo 2011; Ross 2013).11
When it comes to the coding of regimes, I used regime data from Geddes et al.
(2014) (hereafter “GWF”) dataset. Regimes are coded as party, personalist, military,
monarchy or democracy. A number of important oil producers are not coded in the
GWF data due to small population size. I added four cases of major oil producers with
small population size and coded them myself as follows: Bahrain (monarchy), Qatar
(monarchy), Equatorial Guinea (personalist) and Trinidad (democracy since 1961,
Lijphart 2012). I excluded the cases coded in the GWF data as periods of warlord rule
or foreign occupation, such as, for example, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Afghanistan after
2001, East Germany, South Vietnam and South Yemen. I “normalized” the duration of
Oman’s regime (1941-NA)12 so that the maximum duration of regimes in the data does
not exceed a maximum of 100 years. Lastly, I removed all short periods of instability
lasting less than 3 years, because these are better considered as interregna (Geddes
1999).
There are two events of interest: regime failure and democratic transition.
‘Regime stability’ or ‘regime durability’ is understood hereafter as “the degree to which
the political system may be expected to remain in existence” (Huntington 1991, 11). A
more demanding definition of regime stability is the ability of a regime to meet and
overcome crises (Slater and Fenner 2011); as Huntington (1991, 11) explains, “the
stability of a system differs from the nature of the system”. In the GWF dataset, an
autocratic regime failure occurs in the following events: when a competitive elections
took place and a new government is allowed to sworn in; when the government is
toppled by a rebellion, a military coup, civil war or foreign invasion, and replaced by
another regime. A separate variable codes for the type of regime transitions whether a
subsequent regime is autocratic (called “autocratic transition”), democratic (marking
“democratic transition”), warlord or foreign occupied or simply right-censored
indicating that the regime was still in power in 2010.
11 “Oil_gas_value_POP_2009 in Ross’ (2013) dataset. 12 "NA” indicates that the regime was still in power as of December 2010 (Geddes et al. 2014).
86
Figure 3.1. A model of democratic and autocratic transitions
Source: Gleditsch and Choung 2004, 6
Since regime collapse can lead to two outcomes of either democratic transitions
or those leading to a new authoritarian regime (like in Iran after the overthrow of the
Shah in 1979) (see Figure 3.1). Essentially, I follow the logic developed by Gleditsch
and Choung (2004), applied to the oil curse in a recent study by Wright et al. (2012). I
test both variants of the oil curse theory: first, that oil prevents democratic transitions
and, second, that oil makes authoritarian regimes remain authoritarian (authoritarian
durability), even after they have experienced a regime change.
As discussed above, the thesis about oil harmful effects is both between-country
and within-country. To estimate the effect of oil, I use survival analysis which is used
when researchers want to find out how a treatment (in our case, oil) impacts the survival
chances of different subjects (in our case, political regimes) during the observation
period. My study covers 333 regime cases (of which 71 are oil-producing countries and
87
262 - non-oil producing states) for a period of 1950-2010. The unit of analysis is
“political regime” including both autocracies and democracies. The time in power for
regimes ranges from a minimum of 3 years (e.g. Turkey 1980-83, Belarus 1991-94) to a
maximum of 100 (e.g. Saudi Arabia, Oman). The average duration of regimes in the
dataset is 19 years.
3.3.2.Analysis As the analysis shows, the average duration time of regimes in non-oil producing
countries is 17.81 years (median: 14.00), ranging from minimum of 3 years to 85 years
(see Table 3.3). For oil-producers the mean was higher at 27.46 (median: 20.00). The
difference between the two median scores is 6 years. Thus, oil-producing regimes have
on average longer lifespans compared to those that lack oil. These comparative results
are statistically significant (F=18.249, p <.0005).
Table 3.3. Duration of regimes by oil
Duration (years) OIL PRODUCER NON-OIL
Mean 27.5 17.8
Median 20.0 14.0
N 71 262
Source: calculated from dataset
Among regimes without oil (262 in total), regime types were distributed as
follows: 90 were democracy (34% of all non-oil), 62 (24%) were personalist autocracy,
57 (22%) single-party regime, 42 (16%) - military regime, and 11 (4%) monarchy (see
Table 3.4). In regimes with oil (71 in total), 20 (28%) regimes were democracy, 26
(27%) were single party, 14 (20%) were personalist regime, 11 (16%) - military
dictatorship, and 7 (10%) were monarchy. This means that 20 percent of all regimes
with oil were personalist, second after democracy and party-based rule.
88
Table 3.4. Distribution of regimes within oil- and non-oil states
(numbers are counts, percentages in parentheses)
Source: calculated from dataset
As for the distribution of regime types, about 80% of all democracies, personalist
regimes and military dictatorships as well as 75 % of all party-based regimes were in
states that lacked oil.
Table 3.5. Spread of regime types across oil- and non-states
(numbers are percentages)
Of all
democracies
Of all
single-
party
Of all
personalist
Of all military
regimes
Of all
monarchies
Oil
producing
18 25 18 21 39
Non-oil 82 75 82 79 61
TOTAL 100 100 100 100 100
Source: calculated from dataset
OIL PRODUCER NON-OIL
Democracy 20 [28%] 90 [34%]
Party 19 [27%] 57 [22%]
Personalist 14 [20%] 62 [24%]
Military 11 [15%] 42 [16%]
Monarchy 7 [10%] 11 [4%]
TOTAL 71 [100%] 262 [100%]
89
Of all personalist regimes that ever existed 82 percent were oil poor, 18 percent enjoyed
oil wealth. Naturally, most of the world’s regime types were in oil-poor countries
because there are simply more countries that are not oil exporters (see Table 3.5).
3.3.3. Survival estimates
Oil and non-oil
The findings reported in Table 3.6 show survival probabilities for oil and non-oil
producing states when the event of interest is any regime failure. Of 262 non-oil
producing states, 177 underwent regime change or regime failure while 85 of them
continued without any transitions and were still in power at 2010. In those regimes that
had oil, less than half experienced some kind of regime change. Of the total number of
71 oil-producing regimes, 41 were still in power in 2010.
Table 3.6. Regime failures in oil- and non-oil states
Number of Events
Total Number
Number surviving (at 2010) Percent surviving
Non-oil producer 177 262 85 32.40%
Oil-producer 30 71 41 57.70%
Overall 207 333 126 37.80% Source: calculated from dataset
The median scores are 47 years for oil-producing regimes and 17 years for non-oil
regimes (not reported here), which indicates a stark difference in the duration of
regimes with and without oil. This is confirmed in a graph of Kaplan-Meier estimates
below (see Figure 3.2). Other things being equal, regimes that have oil are much more
durable that those that lack it. The Log Rank tests statistic is significant (p<.0005, Chi-
Square: 22.131). This indicates that the difference is statistically significant.
90
Figure 3.2. Kaplan-Meier Survival estimates by oil
Source: calculated from dataset
By regime type
Event: regime failure
As a second step, I compared whether the effect of oil remains strong after the sample is
divided by regime type, i.e. comparing survival probabilities of oil and non-oil
producing states by regime type. This is to check whether the effect of oil is conditioned
on the type of authoritarian rule or not. I first use regime failure as the event of interest,
without separating democratic and autocratic transitions. The results, shown below,
indicate that oil’s stabilizing effects remain strong only in party-based and personalist
regimes, but not military and monarchies. This means that when oil is introduced in
single-party and personalist regimes separately, those that have access to oil have better
survival probabilities than those that lack it. In party-based regimes, the median survival
without oil is 27 years compared to 47 years in oil producers. Of a total number of 76
party regimes, 57 non-oil producers experienced 40 events of some regime change,
while 19 party-based oil-producers had 10 regime collapse events (see Table 3.7).
91
In the personalist regimes, probability of survival at the median is not possible to
calculate (because there are too few regimes that experience any regime change), but
the mean scores are 32 for regimes with oil as opposed to 16 years for regimes without
oil. Of a total number of 76 personalist regimes, 62 were non-oil producers and 14 were
oil-producers. Non-oil regimes had 51 regime changes while oil-producers had only 3
events that qualify as regime failure.
Table 3.7. Number of regime failures by oil in different regimes
Regime type Oil Number of
regime failures
Total number of regimes
party-based
regime
non-oil 40 57
oil 10 19
Overall 50 76
personalist
regime
non-oil 51 62
oil 3 14
Overall 54 76
military
regime
non-oil 40 42
oil 10 11
Overall 50 53
monarchy non-oil 8 11
oil 1 7
Overall 9 18
democracy non-oil 38 90
oil 6 20
Overall 44 110
Overall Overall 207 333
Source: calculated from dataset
In other words, other things being equal, personalist regimes with oil had on average
twice as much chance of survival at any given moment as personalist regimes without
oil. The Chi-Square coefficient for party and personalist regimes are 7.063 and 9.948
respectively and the p values suggest statistically significant results. While the relevant
92
averages for monarchies and democracies are also higher for regimes with oil, for the
military regimes there is almost no difference. For military regimes, monarchies and
democracies, the p values for Log Rank indicators are above 0.05 levels indicating that
the differences for these regime types are not statistically significant. A look at the
survival curves (see Figure 3.3) confirms this as the survival curves for military regimes
overlap considerably which suggests that there is no statistically significant difference
between the two survival functions. I also used an alternative coding with a category of
“mixed” personalist regimes, i.e. regimes that combine personalism with the military or
a hegemonic party. The results are statistically significant. This suggests that oil’s effect
on authoritarian survival is not uniform across regimes types and makes a difference
only for the survival probability of party-based, personalist and mixed-personalist
regimes, but has not effect on the survival of military regimes and monarchies.
Figure 3.3. Kaplan-Meier Survival Estimates for oil and non-oil producers by
regime type
(Event of interest: Regime failure)
Log
Rank
(Mantel-
Cox)
Chi-
Square:
7.063
df: 1
p<0.05
93
Log
Rank
(Mantel-
Cox)
Chi-
Square:
9.948
df: 1
p<0.005
Log
Rank
(Mantel-
Cox)
Chi-
Square:
0.046
df: 1
p>0.5
94
Log
Rank
(Mantel-
Cox)
Chi-
Square:
3.584
df: 1
p>0.05
Log
Rank
(Mantel-
Cox)
Chi-
Square:
1.405
df: 1
p>0.05
95
Source: calculated from dataset
Log
Rank
(Mantel-
Cox)
Chi-
Square:
4.264
df: 1
p<0.05
When autocratic transition is taken as the event of interest, then again the differences
are statistically significant only for party-based regimes, personalist and mixed-
personalist regimes (democracies excluded). For monarchies and military regimes the p
values are >.05 indicating that the results are not statistically significant. [Kaplan-Meier
estimates not shown here].
By regime type
Event: Democratic transition
Table 3.8 below shows the number of democratic transitions in different sub-sets of
authoritarian regimes divided by oil. Among party-based regimes transitions to
democracy are about equally distributed between those with oil and those that lacked it.
Of a total number of 19 democratic transitions in party-based regimes, 12 were in non-
oil and 7 in oil-rich regimes. Among military regimes, the difference is 29 (non-oil) to 9
(oil). The most striking difference is within the personalist sub-set. As can be seen from
the table, among personalist regimes all of the 19 democratic transitions occurred in
non-oil regimes and none in those with oil.
96
Next, I repeat the survival analysis, this time replacing the regime breakdown
with the dichotomous variable capturing democratic transitions. The results shown
below (Figure 3.4) indicate that the statistically significant results (p < .05) obtain only
for personalist regimes. In personalist regimes (14 oil producers, 62 non-oil), those that
had no access to oil experienced 19 events leading to democratic transitions, while the
personalist regimes with oil have no record of a democratic transition. Although the
same is true for monarchies, the result for monarchies is not statistically significant (p >
.05) possibly due to the small sample size for this sub-set. I also use an alternative
coding with a category of “mixed” personalist regimes. The results are not statistically
significant which suggests that oil blocks democratic transitions only in “pure”
personalist regimes.
Table 3.8. Number of democratic transitions by oil in different regimes
Regime type Oil Number of democratic
transitions
Number of regimes
party-based
regime
non-oil 12 57
oil 7 19
Overall 19 76
personalist
regime
non-oil 19 62
oil 0 14
Overall 19 76
military regime non-oil 28 42
oil 9 11
Overall 37 53
monarchy non-oil 2 11
oil 0 7
Overall 2 18
Overall Overall 77 223
Source: calculated from dataset
Figure 3.4 shows Kaplan-Meier survival estimates by oil for regimes when the event of
interest is democratic transitions (shown only for party-based, personalist regimes,
97
military and mixed-personalist regimes) which indicates that the results are statistically
significant only for personalist regimes, and not significant for party-based, military
regimes, monarchies and mixed-personal categories.
Figure 3.4. Kaplan-Meier Survival Estimates
(Event of interest: democratic transition)
Log Rank
(Mantel-
Cox)
Chi-
Square:
0.544
df: 1
p=0.5
[note the
overlappin
g lines
indicate not
statistically
significant
difference]
98
Log Rank
(Mantel-
Cox)
Chi-
Square:
5.961
df: 1
p<0.05
Log Rank
(Mantel-
Cox)
Chi-
Square:
0.112
df: 1
p>0.5
[not
significant]
99
Source: calculated from dataset
Log Rank
(Mantel-
Cox)
Chi-
Square:
0.698
df: 1
p>0.05
[not
statistically
significant]
Finally, if oil affects democratic transitions only in the personalist sub-set of regimes, I
also run a separate analysis by splitting the data into personalist and otherwise (non-
personalist) groups. The results are as follows (see Figure 3.5). When checking for
regime failures, oil has a statistically significant impact on the survival of both
personalist and non-personalist regimes (For non-personalist regimes, Log Rank Chi-
Square: 11.909, p<0.005, for personalist regimes Chi-Square: 9.948, p<0.005). The
same is true for autocratic transitions. Yet, when including democratic transitions as the
event of interest, the results remain significant only for personalist regimes, but
disappear for non-personalist regimes (For non-personalist regimes, Log Rank Chi-
Square: 1.539, p>0.05; for personalist regimes Chi-Square: 5.691, p<0.05) (see Figure
3.5 below). This suggests that, other things being equal, much of oil democracy-
dampening effects occur within the personalist sub-set of autocracy, and not necessarily
in other autocratic regimes. This means oil is a personalist regime’s curse.
100
Figure 3.5. Kaplan-Meier Survival Estimates with data split into personalist and
non-personalist regimes (Event of interest: democratic transition)
NON-Personalist
Log Rank
(Mantel-
Cox)
Chi-Square:
1.593
df: 1
p>0.05 [not
statistically
significant]
Personalist
Source: calculated from dataset
Log Rank
(Mantel-
Cox)
Chi-Square:
5.961
df: 1
p<0.05
101
Within-country comparison
As a next step, I do within-country comparison for 71 regimes that are oil producers.
Does the survival probability of regimes within the oil-producing states depend on the
regime type that they have? Within the oil-producing group, a total number of 16
democratic transitions occurred (see Table 3.9), none of which, as noted above, in
personalist regimes or monarchies. The difference in survival functions between
autocratic regimes (oil states only) is statistically significant (Log Rank test: Chi-Square
54.7, p value < 0.005).
Table 3.9. Number of democratic transitions among oil-rich authoritarian regimes
by regime type
Source: calculated from dataset
In other words, a subset of oil-producing autocracies that has been especially resistant to
democratic transitions is personalist dictatorships. These cases are profiled in Table 3.10
below.
While some may disagree with the inclusion of Russia in the personalist
category, yet the Russian regime has been described by various scholars as personalistic
and neopatrimonial. Electoral competition remains the primary institutional mechanism
for selecting government and it is therefore reasonable to call Putin’s regime a hybrid,
rather than closed authoritarian, regime that combines the institutional procedures
characteristic of democracy with authoritarian practices that violate the essence of
democracy in practice (Levitsky and Way 2010; Hale 2010). Sakwa (2011) refers to
Putin’s Russia as the dual state in which “the legal-normative system based on
Number of
democratic
transitions
Number of regimes
surviving (as of 2010)
Total number
of regimes
Party 7 12 19
Personalist 0 14 14
Military 9 2 11
Monarchy 0 7 7
TOTAL 16 35 51
102
constitutional order is challenged by shadowy arbitrary arrangement [that is] the
administrative regime, populated by various conflicting factions”. Ledeneva (2013)
prefers the local term “sistema” (the Russian word for “system”) to refer to Putin’s
networked model of governance based on a web of largely informal institutions and
relationships. Oil revenues have played a significant role in the entrenchment of the
Putin regime (Goldman 2008; Gaddy and Ickes 2013).
Table 3.10. “Pure” personalist regimes in oil states that have been “immune” to
democratization (N=14)
Country Years Duration Oil income per
capita (2010)
Region
Azerbaijan 1993-NA 17 3718.5 FSU
Cameroon 1983-NA 27 113.72 SS Africa
Chad 1990-NA 20 320.98 SS Africa
Congo-
Brazzaville 1997-NA 13 2482.11
SS Africa
Equatorial
Guinea 1979-NA 31 13997.13
SS Africa
Iraq 1958-63 5 658.92 MENA
Iraq 1963-68 5 646.5 MENA
Iraq 1979-2003 24 665.8 MENA
Kazakhstan 1991-NA 19 3025.83 FSU
Libya 1969-NA 41 8162.1 MENA
Russia 1993-NA 17 2672.29 FSU
Sudan 1989-NA 21 434.43 SS Africa
Venezuela 2005-NA 5 2517.18 L America
Yemen 1978-NA 32 519.17 MENA
Note: NA=still in power as of 2010; The regimes of Qaddafi in Libya and Saleh in Yemen were overthrown in violent uprisings in 2011, but have produced civil war, not democracy, in both countries. Source: from dataset; Regime data from GWF; oil income data from Ross (2013).
103
Another way to show that democratic transitions never occurred in personalist regimes
is presented in Table 3.11 below. The starting point for all democratic transitions was
either military or party-based regime, and never personal rule.
Table 3.11. Democratic transitions in oil-rich states
(N=16)
Country Years Duration Year of
democratic
transition
Regime type Region
Albania 1944-91 47 1991 party E Europe
Argentina 1966-73 7 1973 military L America
Argentina 1976-83 7 1983 military L America
Bolivia 1971-79 8 1979 military L America
Chile 1973-89 16 1989 military L America
Congo-
Brazzaville 1968-91 23 1991
party
SS Africa
Ecuador 1972-79 7 1979 military L America
Hungary 1947-90 43 1990 party E Europe
Indonesia 1966-99 33 1999 party SE Asia
Mexico 1915-2000 85 2000 party L America
Nigeria 1966-79 13 1979 military SS Africa
Nigeria 1993-99 6 1999 military SS Africa
Peru 1968-80 12 1980 military L America
Romania 1945-89 44 1989 party E Europe
Senegal 1960-2000 40 2000 party SS Africa
Venezuela 1948-58 10 1958 military L America
Note: If interregna are included, democratic transitions also occurred in Azerbaijan 1992-93, Mauritania 2007, Russia 1991, and Venezuela 1947. Since these did not lead to a lasting outcome of at least 3 years, they were excluded. Source: calculated from dataset
Democracy was rare in oil states and existed only in the following 19 cases (see Table
3.12). Interesting that democracy was relatively more durable in Latin America
(although the case of Venezuela warrants caution) and Eastern Europe, but not in
104
Africa, and there were no democracies among oil-producers in the former Soviet Union
and he Middle East. The democratic regime that existed in Nigeria between 1979-83
was replaced by another military regime (1983-1993) and then a military-personalist
regime (1993-99) and even after the transition to civilian rule and democracy in 1999,
the Nigerian regime can perhaps be better described as competitive authoritarianism
(Levitsky and Way 2010). The short-lived democratic regime in the Republic of Congo
(1992-97) was succeeded by a personalist regime (1997-present). Democracy in Peru
collapsed on 1992 and was replaced by a personalist regime too (1992-2000), which is
not in the data of oil states because oil income per capita for this period fell below the
hundred dollars/capita threshold (hovered around 50 dollars per capita) and therefore
Peru was coded as non-oil for this period. The Argentinian 1974-76 democracy
collapsed in 1976 and was followed by a military regime (1976-83). Finally, the
Venezuelan long-time democracy collapsed around 2005 and gave rise to a personalistic
regime. Although generalizations may not be accurate, the pattern seems to be that
when an oil-rich democracy breaks down and autocratization takes places, it tends to
produce strong personalistic tendencies (as illustrated by the cases of Congo,
Venezuela, and, to a certain extent, Nigeria and Russia after the early 1990s).
Table 3.12. Democratic regimes in oil states
(N=19)
Country Years Duration Region
Argentina 1974-76 3 L America
Argentina 1984-NA 27 L America
Bolivia 1983-NA 28 L America
Brazil 1985-NA 6 L America
Colombia 1958-NA 52 L America
Congo-Brazzaville 1992-97 5 SS Africa
Croatia 1992-NA 19 E Europe
Ecuador 1979-NA 31 E Europe
Hungary 1990-NA 20 E Europe
Indonesia 1999-NA 11 SE Asia
Mexico 2000-NA 10 L America
Nigeria 1979-83 4 SS Africa
105
Nigeria 1999-NA 11 SS Africa
Peru 1980-92 12 L America
Peru 2010-NA 9 L America
Romania 1990-NA 20 E Europe
Thailand 2007-NA 3 SE Asia
Trinidad and Tobago 1961-NA 50 L America
Venezuela 1958-2005 47 L America
Note: NA=still in power in 2010 Periods of instability coded as democracy but lasted less than 3 years were excluded. These would include the following: Russia 1991-93, Azerbaijan 1993, Mauritania (2007-08), and Venezuela (1947-48). None in MENA and with very short periods in FSU. Source: from dataset
In sum, the findings from the survival analysis can be stated as follows: Oil has the
strongest authoritarian-enhancing and democracy-inhibiting effect in personalist
regimes. Two other types of regime where oil prolonged authoritarian rule are party-
based and mixed-personalist. However, oil had no effect on democratic transition in
these two regime categories. Finally, oil does not seem to have made much of a
difference for military regimes and monarchies (see Table 3.13).
Table 3.13. Survival analysis results summarized: effect of oil on regime
outcomes Strong = statistically significant effect of oil
None = no statistically significant effect of oil
Regime failure Autocratic
transition
Democratic
transition
Party Strong Strong None
Personalist (pure) Strong Strong Strong
Military None None None
Monarchy None None None
Mixed-personalist Strong Strong None
Source: author
106
3.4 Oil, personalization and the case of scrapping term limits
Executive constraints
I also looked at the “personalization” effect, namely the expectation that oil revenue
will force regimes to develop toward personalism or to increase sultanistic tendencies.
Table 3.14 present the scores on the executive constraints scores for personalist and
party-based regimes with oil. According to Polity IV, the concept and corresponding
variable XCONST “refers to the extent of institutional constraints on the decision-
making powers of the chief executive, whether an individual or a collective executive.
This is similar to the notion of ‘horizontal accountability’ found in the democracy
literature but it assumes that dictators may also be bound by certain institutional
constraints” (Marshall et al. 2014, 62). The continuum is a 7-point scale ranging from
the worst score 1 indicating “unlimited executive authority” to 7 = “executive parity or
subordination”. As can be seen from Table 3.15 personalist regimes tend to have on
average less effective constraints on their chief executives compared to more
institutionalized party-based regimes.
Table 3.15. Executive constraints in oil-rich personalist and party-based regimes
Oil-rich personalist
Oil-rich party-based
Regime Executive constraints
(XCONST) score Regime Executive constraints
(XCONST) score Azerbaijan (1993-) 2
Algeria (1962-92) 2
Cameroon (1983-) 2 Angola (1975-) 3
Chad (1990-) 2 Congo Brz.(1968-91) 2
Congo Brz.(1997-) 2 Egypt (1952-) 3 Eq. Guinea (1979-) 2 Gabon (1960-) 3 Iraq (1979-03) 1
Indonesia (1966-99) 2
Kazakhstan (1991-) 2
Malaysia (1957-) 5
Libya (1969-) 1
Mexico (1915-00) 4
Russia (1993-) 4
Senegal (1960-00) 3
Sudan (1989-) 2 Syria (1963-) 3
107
Venezuela (2005-) 4 Tunisia (1956-) 2 Yemen (1978-) 2
Average for group 2.9
Average for group 2.2
Average (pure party) 3.4
Note: scores are the averages for 2005-2010, except for Iraq (2003), Mexico (1990-1995), Senegal (1990-1995), Indonesia (1995-1999), Algeria (1985-1990), Congo (1985-1990); includes all party-based regimes except communist regimes, Iran (difficult to categorize), and Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan inaccurately put in the aggregate category of party-based regimes); XCONST runs from 1 to 7, with higher scores indicating better performance. Source: XCONST scores from Polity IV data, regime codings from the GWF dataset; In the non-communist world, pure party-based regimes with oil are only 5: Angola, Malaysia, Mexico, Senegal, and Tunisia.
I also looked at the potential effects over time, assessing the possible effects of
the 2004 oil boom on the executive constraints. The results reported in Table 3.16
indicate that there was not much change along this measure of checks and balances in a
before-after analysis. Regimes with low constraints on the executive, except for
Malaysia (5) and Venezuela before Chávez (6), largely kept low scores after the oil
boom. There was an unusually striking improvement in the military-led regime in
Algeria (from 2 before oil to 5 after the oil boom) and Syria (from 1 to 3), but there was
no noticeable increase in the executive checks in personalist regimes where these scores
were already very low (except for Russia where this score was higher perhaps due to a
stronger role of the parliament).
Table 3.16. Executive constraints and the 2004 oil boom
Regime XCONST before
XCONST after
Regime type
Algeria 92-NA 2 5 military Angola 75-NA 3 3 party Azerbaijan 93-NA 2 2 personal Bahrain 71-NA 2 2 monarchy Cameroon 83-NA 2 2 personal Chad 90-NA 2 2 personal Congo-Brz 97-NA 1 2 personal Egypt 52-NA 3 3 party Eq. Guinea 1979-NA 2 2 personal Gabon 60-NA 2 3 party Iran 79-NA 3 2 party
108
Kazakhstan 91-NA 3 2 personal Kuwait 61-NA 3 3 monarchy Libya 69-NA 1 1 personal Malaysia 57-NA 5 5 party Oman 41-NA 2 2 monarchy Qatar 1971-NA 1 1 monarchy Russia 93-NA 3 4 personal Saudi Arabia 27-NA 1 1 monarchy Sudan 89-NA 1 2 personal Syria 63-NA 1 3 party Tunisia 56-NA 3 2 party Turkmenistan 91-NA 1 1 party United Arab Emirates 71-NA 3 3 monarchy Uzbekistan 91-NA 1 1 party Venezuela 05-NA 6 4 personal Yemen 78-NA 2 2 personal
Notes: includes the regimes surviving as of 2010, excludes democracies and regimes that democratized. XCONST scores are 6-year averages for the periods of 1990-95 (before oil boom) and 2005-2010 (after oil boom); except for the following cases where scores from other periods were used: not available (Angola 1985-1990, Yemen 1993-1997); regime start date (Azerbaijan 1993-1998, Congo-Brz 1997-2002, Kazakhstan 1992-97, and Russia 1993-1998). XCONST scale is ranging from “1” being the worst to”7” being the best. Source: Polity IV
While oil fuels personalization of power in oil states, there are two exceptions:
first, timing of the regime formation relative to the oil boom (Smith 2007), and second,
the special character of revolutionary regimes. In the case of revolutionary regimes and
the regimes supported by a powerful foreign patron (such as Soviet support to the
communist regimes during the Cold War) the dynamics are expected to be different
because of the external support and because of powerful path-dependent effects of pre-
oil legacies of regime consolidation. Angola, for example, was a Soviet client state
supported by the Soviet Union and Cuba. The regime led by MPLA (People’s
Movement for the Liberation of Angola) survived to this day after winning the
protracted civil war against the UNITA (the National Union for the Total Independence
of Angola). Levitsky and Way (2013) include Angola in their list of remarkably durable
revolutionary regimes. In this war, the MPLA was supported by oil revenues, while the
UNITA benefitted from diamonds produced from areas under its control. By the early
1990s, the MPLA abandoned Marxism as official ideology. However, legacies of the
109
past are still very much present, and the MPLA is still internally structured as a
communist party with party cells penetrating state structures and society. In reality,
separation between the party, government of the day and state institutions in Angola is
“blurred” (Amundsen 2014, 178). As Table 3.14 below shows, in the non-communist
party-based regimes, the parties and the regimes they founded formed before these
countries started to produce oil in significant quantities. While in Angola oil production
began in 1955 (but peaked much later, in 1980) before the MPLA rose to power, it is
well known that the MPLA developed as a leftist guerilla movement in 1956 and
participated as a party in the long-lasting civil war since the 1950s. In other words, the
MPLA regime was shaped by the powerful forces of its engagement in violent struggle
for power. In Malaysia, another non-communist dominant party regime, oil exports
began in 1910 but expanded only in the 1960s. The regime of the ruling National Front
was established in 1957 prior to the oil boom in Malaysia where oil production peaked
only in 1984. Finally, in Tunisia the regime of the Neo-Destour Party (later renamed
into the Rassemblement Constitutionnel Démocratique, RCD), which formed in the
1920s by Tunisian nationalists, was established in 1956, at least a decade before Tunisia
had its oil boom (1966-1974, peaked in 1980).
Except for these few cases of party-based regimes where regimes consolidated
in revolutionary or nationalist movement often prior to the oil boom, oil is closely
linked to personalism.
Table 3.14. Oil production years and type of authoritarianism
Regime Regime
type Year regime established Year of Start of Oil
Peak oil income
per capita Albania 44-
91 party-based
1944, communist Party of Labour 1973 (Ross)
636.19 (1979)
Algeria 62-92
party-military 1962, FLN, military 1958 (production began,
EIA) 2462.68 (1979)
Algeria 92-NA military 1992, military 1958 (EIA)
3721.08 (2008)
Angola 75-NA
party-based 1975, MPLA
1955 (EIA)
702.16 (1980), 4063.83 (2008)
Argentina 66-73 military 1966, military 1971 (Ross)
134.07 (1973)
Argentina military 1976, military 1971 737.09
110
76-83 (1980)
Azerbaijan 93-NA personal 1993, Aliyev family 1991, also 1846 (EIA),
Soviet 4372.79 (2008)
Bahrain 71-NA monarchy 1783, Al Khalifah
family 1934 (other)
7584.27 (1980), 8442.71 (2005)
Bolivia 71-79
military-personal
1971, military, Banzer 1972 (Ross)
381.26 (1982)
Cameroon 83-NA personal 1983, Biya
1977 (1979) (Ross)
361.41 (1985), 183.05 (2008)
Chad 90-NA personal 1990, Déby 2004 (Ross) 411.61 (2008)
Chile 73-89 military-personal
1973, military, Pinochet 1970 (Ross)
237.59 (1981)
Congo-Brz 68-91
party-military
1968, PCT Party, military 1957 (other), 1973 (Ross)
1257 (1983)
Congo-Brz 97-NA personal 1997, Sassou
Nguesso 1957 or 1973 2952.52 (2008)
Ecuador 72-79 military 1972, military 1973 (Ross)
965.35 (1979)
Egypt 52-NA
party-personal-military
1952, NDP, Sadat/Mubarak, military 1975 (Ross)
478.39 (1980), 504.82 (2008)
Eq. Guinea 1979-NA personal 1979, Obiang 1994 (Ross)
21682.97 (2008)
Gabon 60-NA
party-personal
1960, PDG Party, Bongo family
1956 (other), 1961 (Ross)
10836.71 (1979), 6513.78 (2008)
Hungary 47-90
party-based
1947, Socialist Workers’ Party
1974 (Ross)
285.86 (1981), 161.68 (2005)
Indonesia 66-99
party-personal-military
1966, Golkar Party, Suharto, military
1885 (EIA), 1974 (Ross)
415.15 (1980), 264.29 (2008)
Iran 79-NA party-personal
1979, sui generis, Khomeini/Khamene’i 1911 (other), 1950 (Ross)
3265.65 (1979), 2780.85 (2008)
Iraq 32-58 monarchy 1932, Hashemite dynasty 1928 (other)
8622.71 (1979)
Iraq 58-63 personal 1958, Qasim 1928 Iraq 63-68 personal 1963, Arif, Al-Bakr 1928
Iraq 68-79 party-personal 1968, Baath Party 1928
111
Iraq 79-03 personal 1979, Hussein 1928 Kazakhstan
91-NA personal 1991, Nazarbayev 1911 (EIA) 3707.27 (2008)
Kuwait 61-NA monarchy 1752, Al Sabah
family 1938/ 1950s (EIA, other)
67540.64 (1979),
35131.43 (2008)
Libya 51-69 monarchy 1951, King Idris 1961 (other), exact date 25058.87
(1979) Libya 69-
NA personal 1969, Qaddafi 1961 (other), exact date 11272.51
(2008)
Malaysia 57-NA
party-based
1957, National Front (Barisan Nasional, BN)
1910 (other), 1974 (Ross), was modest, expanded only
in 1960s
739 (1984), 1683.22 (2008)
Mexico 15-00
party-based 1915 (1929), PRI
1974 (Ross), modest before 1970s, but oil producer
since 1920s 1308.24 (1982)
Nigeria 66-79 military 1966, military 1958 (other), 1971 (Ross)
1254.25 (1979)
Nigeria 83-93 military 1983, military 1958 (other), 1971 (Ross)
Nigeria 93-99
military-personal
1993, military, Abacha/Abubakr 1958 (other), 1971 (Ross)
Oman 41-NA monarchy 1749, Al Said
family 1964 (other)
9400.89 (1979),
13038.55 (2008)
Peru 68-80 military 1968, military 1974 (Ross) 418.01 (1980)
Qatar 1971-NA monarchy 1725, Al-Thani
family 1950s (other)
21638.21 (1959),
86391.45 (1979)
Romania 45-89
party-personal
1945, Communist Party PCR, Ceaușescu 1958 (Ross)
856.16 (1981)
Russia 93-NA personal 1993, Yeltsin, Putin see USSR
3863.29 (2008)
Saudi Arabia 27-
NA monarchy 1744, Al Saud
family 1938 (other)
37225.26 (1980),
14303.64 (2008)
Senegal 60-00
party-based
1960, Socialist Party of Senegal 1995 (Ross)
1253.39 (1995)
Soviet Union 17-91
party-based
1917, Communist Party
1960 (Ross), production earlier
3871.74 (1980)
Sudan 89-NA personal 1989, al-Bashir 1990s (EIA), 2004 (Ross)
434.43 (2010)
Syria 63-NA party-personal-
1963, Asad family, Baath Party
late 1960s (other), 1974 (Ross)
688.82 (1979),
112
military 763.29 (2008)
Tunisia 56-NA
party-based
1956, Neo-Destour Party/RCD 1966 (other), 1974 (Ross)
631.48 (1980)
Turkmenistan 91-NA
party-personal
1991, Niyazov/Berdimuhammedov 1991, also Soviet
6038.32 (2005)
United Arab Emirates 71-
NA monarchy
1971, Sheikh Zayed/Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed 1962 first oil export (BBC)
74616.08 (1974),
26768.22 (2008)
Uzbekistan 91-NA
party-personal 1991, Karimov 1991, also Soviet
968.73 (2005)
Venezuela 48-58
military-personal
1948, military, Pérez Jiménez
1914 (other)
2211.77 (1957), 6294.62 (1979)
Venezuela 05-NA personal 2005, Chávez 1914
3843.1 (2008)
Yemen 78-NA personal 1978, Saleh
1986 (other), 1988 (Ross)
1022.47 (1993), 804.14 (2005)
Notes: Autocracies only; NA=still in power as of 2010; Oil income is measured in per capita dollars; Start of Oil -the year in which oil income hits the 100 dollar per capita threshold or alternatively as the first year in which oil production starts. Sources: Ross 2013; EIA for various years and countries (http://www.eia.gov/), websites: http://countrystudies.us/persian-gulf-states/37.htm, http://en.nioc.ir/Portal/Home/, http://countrystudies.us/persian-gulf-states/14.htm, http://countrystudies.us/iraq/53.htm http://www.businessinsider.com/libya-oil-exports-2011-2, http://www.bpmb.com.my/gui/pdf/annual_report/2011/20.pdf, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1937-1945/mexican-oil, http://www.nnpcgroup.com/NNPCBusiness/BusinessInformation/OilGasinNigeria/IndustryHistory.aspx, http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/petroleum-development-oman-llc-history/, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/world/countries/tunisia.html, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-14704414 http://www.opec.org/opec_web/en/about_us/171.htm, http://www.mom.gov.ye/en/ The case of scrapping term limits
Removing term limits can be used as a good indicator of the personalization of power.
Hadenius and Teorell (2007), for example, used the leadership turnover as a measure of
the degree of personalism in their study. It seems the tendency to remove limits on
presidential terms can be a more accurate measure of personalization because leaders of
dominant parties can also have long duration in office. Below I argue that presidents in
oil-rich states are more likely to scrap presidential terms than leaders in non-oil states
because of the political incentives oil generates (Andersen and Aslaksen 2010). The
evidence presented below is based on a selective range of observations and should be
taken as suggestive, rather than conclusive.
113
Within the last decade, several presidents, especially in resource-reliant
countries, have attempted to reshape their countries’ constitutional design for their own
benefit by removing presidential term limits.13 It appears that these attempts have been
largely successful in allowing incumbents to extend their term in power. In February
2009, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez won a referendum that allowed him to run
for re-election after his tenure expired in 2012 (Forero 2009). Azerbaijan eliminated
presidential term limits in March 2009. Although reasons for lifting term limits may
vary across states, and although the phenomenon is not unique to resource-abundant
states, the logic seems to be the following.
In resource-rich countries in the developing world, access to state resources is
also a source of enormous benefits. In governance systems in which the state functions
as a “cover” for an extended network of patronage and clientelism, rents obtained from
multiple rent-generating opportunities provide the material underpinning for the entire
clientelist system, at the apex of which is the president – the patron-in-chief. Over time,
as the spoils from commodity exports increase, the quantities of rents available to the
president for distribution also increase. The president uses material rewards, drawn from
large rents and other forms of rent-seeking, to benefit his coterie, cronies, family, and
friends. Other social groups may also benefit from selective dispersal of patronage (e.g.
job positions in the government sector, subsidies on public services) and in exchange
offer their political loyalty.
This submission ultimately dampens societal pressures for political participation
and retards democratization. The leader’s inner circle and cronies who benefit most
from windfall gains, associated corruption and rent seeking develop vested interests in
sustaining their patron’s hold on power. Thanks to the multiple sources of rents that
access to state resources provides, the ruler maintains his support base and consolidates
his power. Since the system is built on personal relations and depends on the ruler, it is
in everyone's interest to support the strongman’s uninterrupted stay in office. Nothing
less than the survival of patronized now depends on the survival of the patron.
The leader, in turn, uses his incumbency advantage, most importantly the control
of state resources and administrative apparatus, to remove previously adopted
limitations on presidential powers. Normally, when the second term starts or some years 13 This sub-section was first published as: “End of Term Limits: Monarchical Presidencies on the Rise”, Harvard International Review, February 28, 2009, http://hir.harvard.edu/archives/1823
114
before the term comes to an end, the incumbent ruler and his innermost circle start to
think of ways to avoid a succession crisis that would put the system at risk of collapse.
Hence the elimination of term limits.
Although the non-reelection rule does not guarantee democracy, ending term
limits erodes one of the essential pillars of presidentialism – a fixed period of time in
office. It makes it harder for opposition candidates to compete for the presidency,
leaving almost no chance for meaningful political change. Deprived of opportunities to
participate in government, the opposition might, if possible, resort to violence to
compete for political power. Overall, this might endanger political stability with
detrimental effects on the prospect for democratic change.
Unrestricted presidencies are especially dangerous if they emerge in states with
a rentier economy. Exempted from the obligation to step down, the president would
solidify his governing coalition, extend his control of the state and media, and
circumscribe political competition. By taking advantage of enormous natural resource
revenues, it is easy to manipulate public opinion, gain electoral support, and garner
political legitimacy. The injection of populist rhetoric and the introduction of a
personality cult around the leader can also help. In fact, the development of the
personality cult is especially ironic since these leaders adopt irresponsible, politically
motivated policies that lead to unsustainable development and the misallocation of
public funds. In institutionally weak environments, limitless presidential power can also
translate into policies geared toward weakening civil society and stifling dissenting
voices. With extraordinary profits available, the government can also strengthen its
repressive capacity to obviate any future attempts to overthrow the regime. With so
large a source of wealth, the government strengthens and expands. It can, however, use
its strength to curtail the formation of interest groups, insulate itself from social
demands, and hold onto power to serve a narrow elite interest.
The referendum held on March 18, 2009 amended the 1995 Azerbaijan
Constitution and lifted restrictions limiting presidential terms to two consecutive five-
year terms. In effect, the amendment meant more than just a formal modification in the
law. In reality, it weakened the already distorted mechanism of checks and balances
granting unlimited powers to the head executive and to continue in office as long as he
sees fit.
115
Azerbaijan failed to develop strong institutional restraints like an effective
legislature, an independent courts system, a strong civil society, and a free media to
avert the negative consequences of term limit removal. The constitutional change only
helped the consolidation of a super-presidential system sustained by political clientelism
and misappropriation of public resources, and undermined the potential of this
increasingly authoritarian state to democratize.
The trend towards a stronger executive is not unique to Azerbaijan. Similar
constitutional manipulations have been carried out elsewhere, but a number of these
changes took places in states which rely on petroleum revenues or other forms of rents.
The post-Soviet region abounds with examples of strong presidents who eliminated
term limits to prolong their hold on power. The 2004 referendum in Belarus, whose
state elites depend heavily on Russian oil and gas transit, lifted the two-term limit on
President Lukashenko, who has been in power since 1994. In Central Asia, Uzbekistan
held two referendums in 1995 and 2002 that extended President Islam Karimov’s term.
The referenda were used to justify his third term. In 2007, Kazakhstan’s parliament
amended the constitution to lift the term limit on the tenure of President Nazarbayev,
who has been in power since the country’s independence in 1991. The change only
affects Mr. Nazarbayev and is not supposed to apply to future presidents. In
Nazarbayev’s Kazakhstan, politics is still run on informal networks and the key criteria
for promotion in the public sector is personal loyalty to the president (Kusznir 2012,
114). In natural gas-rich Turkmenistan, the People’s Council abolished term limits in
1999 and announced that the now defunct ruler, Saparmurat Niyazov
(“Turkmenbashi”), would be “president for life”.
Similar constitutional engineering is not confined to post-Soviet Eurasia. In
Venezuela, a founding member of OPEC, Chávez won approval in the February 2009
referendum for a constitutional amendment that enabled him to run for the presidency
when his term ended in 2012, which he eventually won. A similar constitutional change
was rejected in a previous referendum held in December 2007. In April 2008, President
Paul Biya of Cameroon, a commodity-based African economy, had parliament pass a
constitutional bill abolishing a two-term limit restriction; his party dominated the
parliament. The updated legislation made it possible for Mr. Biya to extend his 25-year
rule over this West African nation. In November 2008, President Abdelaziz Bouteflika
116
of Algeria also had his two-term restriction abolished. Mr. Bouteflika became president
of this major energy-exporting country in 1999 and was re-elected in a landslide victory
in 2004. After the change, he can run for a third time in the presidential race scheduled
for April.
Presidential term limits are crucial institutional guards against executive
monopolization and abuse of power. Scholars of Latin America have argued that the
preference for presidential over parliamentary government has contributed to weak
horizontal accountability that has allowed the executive to concentrate power to an
extreme degree. Consequently, this preference has made democratic consolidation in
this region especially arduous. In the post-communist context, empirical research
suggests that the initial choices in favor of parliamentary government helped
democratization. It is therefore unsurprising that most of the Eastern European
democracies have parliamentary (e.g. the Czech Republic, Hungary) or mixed forms of
government (e.g. Romania). In contrast, states that, like Russia, opted for stronger
presidents have suffered from super-presidentialism, a political system characterized by
the extreme concentration of power in the executive and near-absent checks and
balances. In the post-Soviet region excluding the Baltic states, Moldova among the few
boasts a parliamentary system in the largely presidentialist post-Soviet world: since
2001 the president of Moldova is elected by the 101-member parliament. Although not
a completely democratized polity, Moldova has maintained higher levels of pluralism
than many other states of the former Soviet region.
Azerbaijan’s post-independence elections, except for the presidential election of
the brief democratizing moment of 1992, have all been deemed short of international
standards. The lack of alteration in power testifies to the incumbent's unwillingness to
move out of the office and allow for power rotation. Moreover, from the early 2000s
Azerbaijan has been evolving along the lines of a petro-state in which politicians use
their control of the state, especially over huge petroleum revenues, to benefit in their
private interests. Oil and gas exports have enriched the government’s coffers and
contributed to regime stability, allowing the government – through patronage, public
spending and rent-seeking – to buy public support and to keep the society unmobilized
and unorganized. Examples vary from spending petro dollars on expanding the public
sector to wasteful spending on popular and highly visible projects to financing mega-
117
infrastructural projects across the country. Petroleum has already made the incumbent
authorities rich and strong enough to pre-empt any challenge to their hold on power.
The lifting of term restrictions and granting extra powers to the president undermined
the remainder of Azerbaijan’s potential to democratize.
3.5. Conclusion My study results have three implications for current and future research on oil,
authoritarianism and democratization. First, my findings indicate that not a single
personal authoritarian regime ever transitioned to democracy. Change in personalist oil-
based regimes typically occurred from the outside. Gadhafi’s removal from power in
2011 is one recent example; the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003 after
the military intervention of the U.S. troops is another. This may imply that the poor
record of democratization in oil states in general may be due to an “elective affinity”
between oil and personal rule.
A recent study by Wright et al. (2012) shows that oil has little effect on
transitions to democracy, but has a strong effect on autocratic survival by suppressing
the emergence of a new dictatorship:
“Oil wealth and long-lasting dictatorship go hand in hand – as in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates – not necessarily because oil creates barriers to democracy (after all, Norway’s got oil too) but because it prevents new dictators from seizing power. In other words, increases in oil rents stabilize dictatorships by suppressing challenges from future autocrats, not by quelling democratic opposition movements.” (Frantz et al. 2014).
My analysis shows that different results can be obtained if you enter the type of
authoritarian rule into the equation. While oil stabilizes all dictatorships (except
military), its effects on democratic transitions might be moderated by the authoritarian
institutions, and oil may interact differently with different institutions. The fact that oil
prevented democratic transitions in personalist regimes, but not necessarily in other
types of autocracy (after all, party-based regimes in Mexico and Indonesia did
democratize), suggests that oil and personalist institutions are positively related.
118
3.6. Appendix: List of oil-producing states and their respective regime type
Country Years in power Duration Regime type Oil income per capita (2010)
Albania 1944-91 47 party 233* Algeria 1962-92 30 party 538.26 Algeria 1992-NA 18 military 2092.73 Angola 1975-NA 35 party 2985.54
Argentina 1966-73 7 military 134.07 Argentina 1974-76 3 democracy 331.11 Argentina 1976-83 7 military 531.97 Argentina 1984-NA 27 democracy 629.75 Azerbaijan 1993-NA 17 personal 3718.5
Bahrain 1971-NA 39 monarchy 2739.36 Bolivia 1971-79 8 military 329.4 Bolivia 1983-NA 28 democracy 335.53 Brazil 1985-NA 6 democracy 319.43
Cameroon 1983-NA 27 personal 113.72 Chad 1990-NA 20 personal 320.98 Chile 1973-89 16 military 140*
Colombia 1958-NA 52 democracy 592.64 Congo-Brz 1968-91 23 party 719.77 Congo-Brz 1992-97 5 democracy 693.22 Congo-Brz 1997-NA 13 personal 2482.11
Croatia 1992-NA 19 democracy 161.73 Ecuador 1972-79 7 military 965.35 Ecuador 1979-NA 31 democracy 974.7 Egypt 1952-NA 58 party 332.6
Equatorial Guinea 1979-NA 32 personal 13997.13 Gabon 1960-NA 50 party 4880.41
Hungary 1947-90 43 party 107.79 Hungary 1990-NA 20 democracy 105.5* Indonesia 1966-99 33 party 230* Indonesia 1999-NA 11 democracy 176.74
Iran 1979-NA 31 party 2043.28 Iraq 1932-58 26 monarchy 628.04 Iraq 1958-63 5 personal 658.92 Iraq 1963-68 5 personal 646.5 Iraq 1968-79 11 party 8622.71 Iraq 1979-03 24 personal 665.8
Kazakhstan 1991-NA 19 personal 3025.83
119
Kuwait 1961-NA 49 monarchy 24685.85 Libya 1951-69 18 monarchy 7430.87 Libya 1969-NA 41 personal 8162.1
Malaysia 1957-NA 53 party 983.5 Mexico 1915-2000 85 party 550.38 Mexico 2000-NA 10 democracy 736.51 Nigeria 1966-79 13 military 1254.25 Nigeria 1979-83 4 democracy 432.31 Nigeria 1983-93 10 military 186.51 Nigeria 1993-99 6 military 151.07 Nigeria 1999-NA 11 democracy 509.77 Oman 1941-NA 100 monarchy 10755.46 Peru 1968-80 12 military 418.01 Peru 1980-92 12 democracy 213* Peru 1910-NA 9 democracy 146.63 Qatar 1971-NA 40 monarchy 28154.26
Romania 1945-89 44 party 229.87 Romania 1990-NA 20 democracy 195.14 Russia 1993-NA 17 personal 2672.29
Saudi Arabia 1927-NA 83 monarchy 9813.87 Senegal 1960-2000 40 party 864.26
Soviet Union 1917-91 74 party 1305.71 Sudan 1989-NA 21 personal 434.43 Syria 1963-NA 47 party 590.16
Thailand 2007-NA 3 democracy 188.74 Trinidad and
Tobago 1961-NA 50 democracy 7327.15
Tunisia 1956-NA 54 party 262.85 Turkmenistan 1991-NA 19 party 2423.35 United Arab
Emirates 1971-NA 39 monarchy 10849.52
Uzbekistan 1991-NA 19 party 391.28 Venezuela 1948-58 10 military 2136.52 Venezuela 1958-05 47 democracy 2945.32 Venezuela 2005-NA 5 personal 2517.18
Yemen 1978-NA 32 personal 519.17 Note: *For Albania, Indonesia and Peru, the figures are the averages for the 1980s, for Chile- the average for 1973-89, for Hungary - the average for 2000-10. Source: from dataset, regime categorizations are from the GWF data (http://sites.psu.edu/dictators/); oil data from Ross (2013)
120
Chapter 4. Oil, Personalism and Regime Stability in Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan illustrates the tendency of oil to reinforce personalism. The regime that
emerged after a short and unsuccessful attempt to transition to democracy in 1992-1993
was described as personalistic, neopatrimonial and even sultanistic (Guliyev 2005). The
most striking development was that with the start of an oil boom in 2003-2004, the
leadership has become even more discretionary as the role of parliament was weakened,
the political opposition was denied access to policymaking, and all independent centers
that could incubate opposition were eliminated. The control of the oil revenue flows via
the national company and the state oil fund was tightly controlled by the president and
patronage networks have expanded. In the following chapter, I show that as oil
windfalls were flooding the Azerbaijani state’s coffers the personalism of the regime
has increased. A remarkable stability of the regime for the last 20 years evidenced by
the lack of coups or any major threats to the regime can be explained by the symbiosis
between the oil rents, under the control of the ruling elite, and the regime’s strong
sultanistic tendencies. As a result, the prospects for democratic change look very bleak
as the ruling regime elite is “sufficiently monolithic and does not have any serious
groups able to challenge the First Person from the inside” (Abbasov 2011, 121).
4.1. Introduction
Azerbaijan was a country of political instability as it gained independence from the
Soviet Union in 1991. Following a series of leadership changes during 1991-92, the
leader of the Popular Front, Abulfez Elchibey, won Azerbaijan’s first democratic
presidential elections in 1992. However, the devastating war with Armenia, the
government’s inability to exercise effective control over the territory and a Russian-
backed coup by a rebel army commander forced the Elchibey government to step
down.14 The collapse of the Popular Front government led to a shift of power to Heydar
Aliyev, who previously served as First Secretary of the Azerbaijan Communist Party
from 1969 to 1982 and as a member of the Politburo and First Deputy Chairman of the
Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union (1982-7). During his presidency (1993-2003),
14After losing power in 1993, the Azerbaijan Popular Front split into several smaller opposition parties (see Heinrich, 2010).
121
President Aliyev ensured political order and peace, but suppressed political pluralism.
In the political system crafted by Aliyev political power was both de facto and de jure
(the 1995 constitution) concentrated in the executive branch.
Ilham Aliyev became president of the country in 2003, shortly after his father’s
death. The father-to-son transfer of power was carefully managed and successfully
implemented. With regard to the events of 2003, the Polity Project notes that “executive
recruitment in Azerbaijan has taken on the attributes of a modern-day dynastic system”
(Polity IV Azerbaijan 2008; also see New York Times 2003). On becoming president,
Ilham Aliyev took over the highest position of authority, not only in the formal
hierarchy but also in the informal network of competing elites. Having kept in place
many members of his father’s elite, the young leader needed to assert control over the
political establishment – including the ruling New Azerbaijan Party (YAP) – dominated
by an entrenched old guard.15 The period immediately preceding and following Ilham
Aliyev’s re-election for a second term in October 2008 was marked by further steps
towards the consolidation of the authoritarian regime established by his father. Among
other things, this included a measure that enabled the young president to concentrate
even more power in his own hands. In March 2009, a constitutional referendum
approved the removal of term limits on the presidency, a juridical restriction that would
have disqualified the current president from running in the next presidential election in
2013 had it not been lifted. The abolition of term limits was also meant to prevent any
elite challengers from standing for the presidency (Economist Intelligence Unit 2010b).
Azerbaijan’s politics has been elite-dominated.16 The conventional approach to
elite analysis as applied to Azerbaijan has for a long time argued that the country is
governed by a strong leader and several “clan” networks. I begin by outlining this
15 Reportedly, Aliyev’s initial intention was generational change within the elite, but this met with opposition from the old guard members of the elite (Ismailzade 2004). A US Embassy cable reported that “Aliyev’s cabinet has changed very little over the years, with few ‘reformers’ brought in or remaining in power” (US Embassy cable, President Ilham Aliyev – Michael (Corleone) on the outside, Sonny on the Inside, by Donald Lu, 18 September 2009, available at http://wikileaks.ch/cablegate.html, accessed 7 December 2010). 16 For the purposes of this study, I use the term ‘elite’ to refer to “persons who are able, by virtue of their authoritative positions in powerful organizations and movements of whatever kind, to affect national political outcomes regularly and substantially” (Higley and Burton 1989, 18). Here I focus on the political elite and, in particular, the most powerful people at or near the top of the ‘pyramid of power’ (Putnam 1976, 14), although recognizing the difficulty of separating the political elite from the remaining elites in nondemocratic polities (Blondel and Müller-Rommel 2007, 824).
122
popular perspective. In the next section I use the available evidence to examine the
extent of power concentration, the character of the public administration and the
possibilities for patronage.17 I then turn to the elite structure and its composition, paying
special attention to the internal dynamics – that is, patterns of relations between the
ruler and groups that constitute the ruling elite. Finally, I discuss how the nature of the
country’s political economy, dominated by the oil sector and overly dependent on
petroleum rents, has made it possible for Azerbaijan’s long-serving rulers to sustain the
vast patronage network on which the incumbent regime is based.
4.2. Perspectives on Azerbaijani elites and politics
The prevailing approach to the analysis of the structure of power elites in Azerbaijan
postulates that after his comeback to power in 1993 Heydar Aliyev put his associates,
supporters and friends in positions of power in exchange for their loyalty. Many of
these appointees were erstwhile Soviet nomenklatura cadres (De Waal 2003, 27;
Cheterian 2010, p. 103). It is also believed that associates of these individuals constitute
powerful elite groups, generally referred to as regional ‘clans’ (Kechichian and Karasik,
1995; Avioutskii, 2007; Gaman-Golutvina, 2007) or networks that combine elements of
clan and patronage (Rasizade, 2004; Bunce and Wolchik, 2008; Gojayev, 2010). The
International Crisis Group (ICG 2004, 9) describes this system as “a pyramidal web
[with the president and his family at the apex] of patronage and often-institutionalized
corruption where regional and clan influences remain strong”. Guseynov (2004) traces
the roots of this structure of power, which he calls the ‘state-tribal machine of rule’,
back to Soviet times, when Heydar Aliyev was First Secretary of the Azerbaijani
Communist Party.
The ‘clan’ groups are typically associated with particular regions. Regional
‘clans’ favour natives from their regions for public service jobs, considering them more
trustworthy. The Nakhchivanis, the Yerazis (ethnic Azerbaijanis originating from
Armenia) and the Kurdish groups are the most commonly identified ‘clans’ within the
17 Considering that reliable evidence on Azerbaijani elites is in short supply, I used secondary sources to identify key members of the political elite. I also found the US Embassy cables released by WikiLeaks that revealed details about the president and members of his entourage useful reading. This strategy is not without weaknesses, but nevertheless I subscribe to a BBC reporter’s apt observation that, “[t]he Azeri elite keep themselves to themselves, but most people know who they are” (Esslemont 2010).
123
ruling elite.18 Many of the appointed leaders representing these networks have kept their
position in the elite under the young president.
Most existing accounts of the Azerbaijani elite also point to presidential
patronage as an essential element in this type of authority structure (Wheatley and
Zürcher, 2008; Aliyeva, 2009; Guliyev, 2009a; International Crisis Group, 2010a).
Patronage is used by the president to buy loyalty and to accommodate rival factions
within the elite. Corruption is considered another pillar of this system of governance,
which allows the ruler to expand his patronage networks (ICG 2010a, 11). Clan and
corruption, when combined, operate as a ‘clan-franchise’ system, in which each major
clan oversees and extracts profits from one or several ‘corruption profit centers’ (such
as ministries, major agencies, state monopolies) acquired as ‘franchises’ from the
presidential apparatus (Johnson 2006, 4-7).
4.3. Evidence
4.3.1. Power concentration
The current Azerbaijani regime is based on personal rule characterized by a high degree
of power concentration, neopatrimonial public administration and the use of a patron-
client network as the principal institutional mechanism for wielding political power.
With regard to the extent of power concentration, there is no balance in the
distribution of power between the executive office and the legislature in Azerbaijan. In
fact, power is highly centralized and concentrated in the presidential office, or rather in
the person of the president. Although the constitution of 1995 establishes the division of
powers as the ‘basis for state’, an effective separation of powers between different
branches is not implemented in practice (Bertelsmann Stiftung 2010, 5). The Milli
Majlis (parliament) lacks autonomy, has either very limited or no legislative oversight
and acts merely as a rubber stamp for bills that originate from the executive, especially
from the presidential apparatus. The judiciary system is not sufficiently developed and
courts are not independent.
18 Kamaladin Heydarov (minister of emergencies) and Ramiz Mehdiev (head of the presidential administration), Jalal Aliyev (president’s uncle and parliament member), and Baylar Eyyubov (head of the presidential security guard), respectively, lead these three ‘clans’.
124
4.3.2. Public administration, patron-client networks and patronage
possibilities
Extreme centralization of power runs parallel with the high degree of its
personalization. Many senior positions in the state bureaucracy are filled by loyal
appointees of the late President Aliyev. An independent report commissioned by
UNDP-Azerbaijan (United Nations Development Programme) finds that many of
today’s senior public servants, who assumed positions in the 1990s, in fact began their
careers in the 1970-80 period, at a time when Heydar Aliyev was responsible for
bureaucratic appointments and promotions (Rohozinski 2005, 12). The report also
suggests that the personalization of state administration can actually be positive as it
promoted intra-elite coordination and political stability:
While this personalization and centralization of power may be unseemly from a ‘bureaucratic’ point of view, the administration’s personalized ties to Heydar Aliyev played an important role in the re-stabilization of Azerbaijan following the turmoil of the 1992-95 period. Stability was ensured by a system of governance that favoured loyalty over pluralism, and where authority was highly centralized on the executive branch, and specifically within the office of the President. Heydar Aliyev’s personal authority and loyal following within the public service ensured cooperation and coordination within government institutions, while personal loyalties facilitated cooperation amongst the political leadership. (Rohozinski 2005, 12)
As a useful approach to analysing the structure of authority in Azerbaijan, I propose to
imagine a series of interconnected patron-client circles, with the president and his
family at the centre of the network.19 As the ultimate decision-maker, the president
determines how to dispense patronage, such as public sector jobs and all the benefits
and privileges that accompany public office and access to state resources. According to
Pleines (2012), this role of president as “bribe arbiter” helped mitigate potential power
struggles between rent-seeking groups and ensured the president’s firm grip on power.
Although it is difficult to measure patronage directly, it is possible to estimate
the scope of patronage possibilities. Here I use two measures to evaluate the extent of
patronage possibilities in Azerbaijan20: the share of public sector employment in total
19 Snyder (2006) emphasizes that in systems of personal rule a network of patron-client relationships serves as the ‘infrastructure of political power’. For recent discussions of clientelism and patron-client relations, see Hicken (2011) and Heinemann-Grüder (2012). 20 The size of the public sector (wages and/or personnel) is the most commonly used proxy for measuring clientelism and patronage (see Hicken, 2011, 304-305).
125
employment and the size of the public sector as a percentage of the population.21 For
comparative purposes, I also provide the relevant statistics for neighbouring Armenia
and Georgia. As Table 4.1 shows, despite a general shrinking of public sector
employment in all three countries between 1995 and 2008, Azerbaijan has been able to
keep a larger
Table 4.1. Share of public sector employment in total employment in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia (percentage) 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 Armenia 49.8 38.9 37.1 30.3 27.4 26.5 24.8 Azerbaijan 56.1 51 46.5 46.2 36.2 33.6 33.4 Georgia 42.4 30.1 28.7 34.6 31.3 25.1 N/A 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 Armenia 25.8 23.3 21.1 19.8 19.6 19.3 18.8 Azerbaijan 32.0 31.5 31.7 31.9 32.0 36.3 36.4 Georgia 23.5 24 22.8 23 20.6 N/A N/A Source: LABORSTA Database, Public Sector Employment Statistics, International Labour Organisation, available at http://laborsta.ilo.org/, accessed 1 December 2010. proportion of its employed population in the public sector and, since 2007, has even
been able to reverse the downward trend. While Azerbaijan’s public sector in general
became smaller in size, the share of public sector employment in total employment
never fell below the level of 30 per cent. Whereas public employment in the period
covered shrank by more than 60 per cent in Armenia and halved in Georgia, in
Azerbaijan this figure is less dramatic: its public sector contracted by a third.
Table 4.2. Size of the public sector in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia (in thousands) Public sector1 Population2 Public sector as percentage of the
population Armenia 210.3 3226.9 6.5 Azerbaijan 1476.4 8032.8 18.4 Georgia 360.3 4435.2 8.1 1Figures are the most recent available (2008); the figure for Georgia is for 2006. 2Population figures are for 2000, based on data from the respective countries’ state statistical offices: State Statistical Committee of the Republic of Azerbaijan, National Statistics Office of Georgia and Statistical Yearbook of Armenia (2009). Source: LABORSTA Database, Public Sector Employment Statistics, International Labour Organization, available at http://laborsta.ilo.org/, accessed 1 December 2010.
21 Public sector employment is defined by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) as “all employment of general government sector […] plus employment of publicly owned enterprises and companies”. Relevant data are provided by the national statistical institutes of the ILO member states (see Hammouya, 1999).
126
Moreover, in 2008 Azerbaijan had a much larger public sector relative to the size of its
population than Armenia and Georgia, whose populations are much smaller. At that
time, 18.4 per cent of the Azerbaijani population worked in the public sector, compared
to only 6.5 per cent in Armenia and about 8 per cent in Georgia (see Table 4.2). The
availability of enormous possibilities for patronage and the fact that Azerbaijani leaders
have maintained a large public sector, which they and their senior officials have readily
staffed with their ‘own people’, suggest that patronage plays a crucial role in the
functioning of the Aliyev regime.
4.4. Elite Composition
The top tier of the ruling elite consists of the following three groups: the ‘old guard’, the
‘oligarchs’ and the ‘family’ (ICG 2010a). Table 4.3 profiles the key representatives of
these powerful groups. As Table 4.3 shows, the governing elite encompasses some
members of the Aliyev family, namely his wife (Mehriban Aliyeva) and her family (the
Pashayevs), and the leaders of several notable factions who occupy top
Table 4.3. The composition of the Azerbaijani elite, circa 2009-10
Political position Business interests Presidential family
Regional network
The ‘old guard’ Garalov, Zakir Prosecutor general (since
2000) N/A No —
Mehdiyev, Ramiz Chief, presidential administration (since 1995)
N/A No Nakhchivani
Usubov, Ramil Minister of the interior (since 1994)
N/A No —
The ‘oligarchs’ Abdullayev, Rovnag
President, SOCAR (since 2005)
SOCAR and subsidiaries No Nakhchivani
Heydarov, Kamaladdin Heydarov family
Chairman, state customs committee, (1995-2006); Minister of emergencies (since 2006)
Food processing, agriculture, construction business, real estate, chemicals, textiles, tourism, banking, insurance
No Nakhchivani
Mammadov, Ziya Mammadov family
Chairman of Azerbaijan state railway administration (1996-2002); Minister of transportation (since 2002)
Passenger transport and cargo shipments, construction business, insurance, banking
No —
The ‘family’
127
Aliyeva, Mehriban (née Pashayeva) Pashayev family1
President, Heydar Aliyev foundation (since 2004) MP, Milli Majlis (since 2005)
Construction business, real estate, insurance, financial sector, telecommunications, cosmetics
Yes Baku/Absheron
Aliyev, Jalal MP, Milli Majlis (since 1995)
N/A Yes Yerazi
Eyyubov, Baylar Chief, president’s personal security guard (since 1993) Deputy chief, special state protection service (since 2003)
Series of enterprises in Ganja area, construction business, monopoly on banana imports
Yes Kurdish/ Nakhchivani
Talibov, Vasif Head, Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic (since 1995)
All major businesses in Nakhchivan
Yes Nakhchivani
1Other influential members of the Pashaev family are Nargiz Pashaeva (the First Lady’s sister), who heads the Moscow State University’s Baku branch; Arif Pashaev (the First Lady’s father), who is the rector of the National Aviation Academy; and Hafiz Pashaev (the First Lady’s uncle), who is a deputy foreign minister and the rector of the Azerbaijan diplomatic academy. The Pashaevs are also believed to have control over the ministries of culture and tourism, youth and sports, health and education. Sources: Biographical database Adam.az, available at http://adam.az/; ICG 2004, 2010a; Dilavarli, 2009; Norwegian Helsinki Committee, 2009; Gojayev, 2010; ‘K. Heydəәrovun oğulları böyük biznesdəә’, Azadliq.org – RFE/RL Azerbaijani Service, 17 February 2010, available at: http://www.azadliqradiosu.az/content/article/1960290.html, accessed 25 June 2010; Esslemont, 2010; Ismayilova, 2011a; the US Embassy cables released by WikiLeaks (available at http://wikileaks.ch/cablegate.html): ‘Azerbaijan: Who owns what? Part 1 – the First Lady’s family’ by Donald Lu, 27 January 2010; ‘Azerbaijan: Who owns what? Vol. 2 – the Minister of Emergency Situations, beluga caviar, and fruit juice’ by Donald Lu, 25 February 2010; ‘President Ilham Aliyev – Michael (Corleone) on the outside, Sonny on the Inside’, by Donald Lu, 18 September 2009, accessed 7 December 2010. positions in the government and other state institutions. The influence of elite members
is measured by their proximity to the president, as the distribution of power among the
clientelist networks radiates from him.
These networks are not necessarily tied by bonds of kinship, as the fourth
column in Table 4.3 demonstrates, and therefore the term ‘clans’ may not be the most
appropriate way to describe them.22 Considering their instrumental character, these
patron-clientelist networks are organized around access to and distribution of material
resources which are exchanged for political support and loyalty. However, given that
political clientelism tends to promote “loyalties to kith and kin” (Van de Walle 2001,
119), some of these networks are in fact extended families and/or promote members of a
privileged geographic descent. Groups within the elite are linked to each other through
clientelism, but these ties are quite often cemented through marriage and extended
family connections. For example, Vasif Talibov, the long-serving head of the
Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic who controls almost the entire economy of that 22 Schatz (2012) defines a clan as ‘an identity group or network of individuals linked through demonstrable kinship’ (my emphasis). Sidikov (2004) proposes instead the term ‘regional grouping’, understood as a ‘strategy to capture resources’.
128
region, is the son-in-law of the niece of the late President Aliyev (Norwegian Helsinki
Committee 2009, 17).
4.5. The oil economy and rent capturing
4.5.1. Oil and the economy Azerbaijan’s economy has been traditionally dominated by petroleum. Baku is one of
the world’s oldest producers of petroleum. Oil production began here in the second half
of the 19th century. The first industrial well was drilled at Bibi-Heybat on the Absheron
peninsula near Baku in 1848. During 1899-1901, Azerbaijan was the largest producer of
oil in the world. Its output of 11.5 million tons (mt) made up more than a half of the
world’s total production (for comparison, the USA produced 9.5 mt). During World
War II, Azerbaijan contributed 63.2 percent of total Soviet oil production, but by the
end of WWII oil production declined. Between 1947 and 1963, oil production stabilized
at about 21 mt/y. In 1948, new oil deposits were discovered in the Caspian Sea shelf
(the offshore Oil Rocks deposit) and another 23 offshore deposits explored, including
Azeri-Chirag-Deepwater Guneshli and Shah Deniz (a major gas field). After WWII, the
Soviet policymakers decided to develop the oil and gas fields in Siberia which became
the priority areas for investments. By 1950, the new fields accounted for 45 percent of
Soviet oil production. As a result, in 1969 oil production in Azerbaijan SSR declined
and recession lasted until 1985. Since 1985 production stabilized at around 13 mt/y and
dropped further after independence (in 1991) reaching the lowest levels at 9.1 mt in
1996-1997 (see Figure 4.1).23
After independence, the Popular Front government of Elchibey (1992-93)
started negotiations with foreign oil companies about shared exploration of the oil and
gas deposits in the Azerbaijani section of the Caspian Sea. The government of Aliyev
continued negotiations. In September 1994, the first oil contract was signed between the
State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (SOCAR) and a consortium of foreign energy
companies. Azerbaijan is estimated to earn about $ 200 billion in total revenue given
favorable prices.
23 This short historical note on oil production in Azerbaijan during the first oil boom and during Soviet times draws from Bagirov (2007) and Isayev (2008).
129
Figure 4.1. Azerbaijan: Crude Oil Production, 1980-2010
(in thousand of metric tons)
Source: IMF various years, SOCAR
Today Azerbaijan’s oil reserves are estimated at 7 billion barrels (b/bbl) (1
billion tons) and 30 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of natural gas (compare to Kazakhstan’s oil
reserves 39.8 b/bbl and Turkmenistan gas at 265 Tcf) (BP 2011; EIA 2012; AzStat).
The country’s oil and gas reserves account for 0.5 and 0.7 percent of global reserves of
oil and gas respectively. Most of Azerbaijan’s oil output (80 percent in 2010) comes
from the giant Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli (ACG) oil field. The largest natural gas deposit is
the Shah Deniz field. Oil production currently stands at 1 million barrels per day (bbl/d)
and is expected to pick by the year 2014 and then start to decline to be completely
exhausted in 20-25 years (IMF 2010).
The oil boom from around 2004 generated enormous income as can be seen
from Figure 4.2.
Azerbaijan: Crude Oil Production, 1980-2010 (in thousand of metric tons)
1.000
4.000
7.000
10.000
13.000
16.000
19.000
22.000
25.000
28.000
31.000
34.000
37.000
40.000
43.000
46.000
49.000
1980
1982
1984
1986
1988
1990
1992
1994
1996
1998
2000
2002
2004
2006
2008
2010
130
Figure 4.2. Azerbaijan: Petroleum income per capita in US dollars
Source: Ross 2013
In the wake of Soviet collapse, Azerbaijan experienced a dramatic decline in the
economic performance, which was one of the worst even by post-Soviet standards. The
conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh aggravated economic recovery as it was a significant
drain on public finance. From 1992 to 1995, the country’s real GDP growth was
negative. In 1993, the economy declined -23.1 percent. During this time, real GDP fell
by more than 70 percent. Government revenues declined dramatically while spending
remained high due to war. As a result, large fiscal deficits accumulated during 1992-
1994. To deal with this challenge of mitigating the economic crisis and its
ramifications, the government pursued a reform program to establish basic market
institutions and partial liberalization. In the early 1995, the Aliyev government
implemented an economic stabilization reform program guided by the World Bank.
Small-scale enterprises were privatized, the fiscal system was modernized, and general
macroeconomic conditions were stabilized. GDP began to recover in 1996. But, most
important, the government promoted foreign investments in the energy sector.
Export of first “new” oil started in late 1997 through the so called “Early Oil”
Northern Route (from Baku to the Russian port of Novorossiysk on the Black Sea). The
second pipeline from Baku to Supsa on the Black Sea became operational in 1999.
Inflows from “early” oil exports, signature bonuses and foreign direct investments
brought in much-needed foreign exchange. Net foreign exchange earnings were
0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000 3500 4000 4500 5000
1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010
Petroleum Income Per Capita (Ross)
131
substantial already in 1996-1999. The launch of the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli in 1997
marked the beginning of the rise in oil output (Aliyev 2010). First post-Soviet oil was
produced from an offshore platform on November 7, 1997 from the $ 8 billion
Azerbaijan International Operating Company (AIOC) to be transported to Novorossiysk
on Russia’s Black Sea.
On May 25, 2005 the presidents of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey and Kazakhstan
met at the Sangachal terminal near Baku to inaugurate a third pipeline to carry oil from
the ACG oil field (and since 2008 Kazakh oil from the Tengiz oil field) through Tbilisi
to the Turkish port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC)
began exporting crude in July 2006. The South Caucasus gas pipeline (Baku-Tbilisi-
Erzerum) became operational in 2006. The ACG project, the Shah Deniz project, the
BTC, and the South Caucasus pipeline attracted $25 billion in total investment as of
2008 (Aliyev 2010).
Azerbaijani politics is confined to a relatively narrow circle of powerful men for
whom political power also means access to economic wealth. It has become a common
belief that the dividing lines between politics and economics and between the public and
private spheres are blurred in Azerbaijan. Key sectors of the economy are controlled by
those who have close ties to the president and his inner circle. The second column in
Table 4.3 lists some of the enterprises and other economic assets owned or believed to
be owned by the members of the ruling elite.
Control of the country’s oil wealth and concentration of economic resources in
the governing elite is believed to be the primary contributor to the regime’s endurance
(Aliyeva 2009; Guliyev 2009a; Ahmadov 2011; Radnitz 2012). The oil and gas sector is
controlled by the president and his family (e.g. Hoffman, 1999, 13; Meissner 2012).
President Aliyev wields ultimate authority over the State Oil Company (SOCAR) and
also has unlimited power to decide on how to spend money from the State Oil Fund
(SOFAZ). Members of the Aliyev family, his associates and cronies control many
lucrative sectors outside the oil industry. These typically are large and medium-sized
enterprises in construction, infrastructure building, banking, services and other
industries. To give an example, an investigation conducted by the Radio Free Europe
(RFE)/Radio Liberty (RL) Azerbaijan Service recently revealed that Arzu Aliyeva, the
daughter of the incumbent president, has become a co-owner of Silkway Bank, a
132
company belonging to the airline service conglomerate SW Holding. The acquisition of
the shares in the company was achieved through the dubious procedure of privatizing
AZAL Bank (Asadzade and Ismayilova 2010). The two daughters of President Aliyev
are also believed to own a leading telecom operator Azerfon through three offshore
companies registered under their names in Panama (Ismayilova 2011b).
A recently released US Embassy cable24 compares the situation in today’s
Azerbaijan to medieval feudalism, adding that “a handful of well-connected families
control certain geographic areas, as well as certain sectors of the economy [...] with
general agreement among leading families to divide the spoils and not disturb one
another’s areas of business or geographic control”.
Of interest also is the elite members’ interest in controlling economic areas
outside the petroleum industry. The economy of Azerbaijan generates oil rents which
are easy to capture, given the weakness of the accountability procedures. The
proliferation of elite-controlled enterprises in the construction sector suggests that elites
also seek to gain possession of rents on the spending side. According to Ross (2008), in
an economy excessively reliant on petroleum such as the one in Azerbaijan, the private
sector tends to shrink over time, while the only survival strategy for private companies
is to secure access to government contracts for building physical infrastructure and
providing services to the oil industry (some of the very few spillovers from the oil
sector). Provided that many of these companies are controlled by the state officials as
well and that the allocation and spending of public funds generally lack transparency, it
is possible to see here the corrupt practice of granting government procurement
contracts. In these conditions, awarding government contracts can serve as a political
instrument through which the regime can keep the business elites – especially those who
operate autonomously – dependent, loyal and politically marginal (Ross 2008).
Corruption, which in Azerbaijan takes place largely at the level of grand corruption and
murky commercial transactions, has been a source of “personal income” for the elites
and used by the president to stabilize the regime (Pleines 2012, 215).
While business magnates emerged in Russia in the 1990s as a result of rigged
privatization and then began to push forward their political ambitions, the phenomenon
24 US Embassy Cable (27 January, 2010) Azerbaijan: Who owns what? Part 1 – the First Lady’s Family, by Donald Lu, available at http://wikileaks.ch/cablegate.html, accessed 7 December 2010.
133
of state capture by ‘oligarchs’ (Treisman 2007), in Azerbaijan no serious privatization
ever occurred. Partial economic reform went no further than handing some state-owned
enterprises to regime cronies. The selective nature of economic reform, which benefited
the elite more than anyone else, and the prevalence of client-patron relations have
prevented the formation of a genuine capitalist market economy in Azerbaijan.
4.6. Threats to regime stability
4.6.1. Intra-elite threats Perhaps the most serious threat emerged during the presidential election in October
2003, when poor health of the ailing president engendered a potentially destabilizing
succession crisis. But the problem of succession was settled by keeping power in the
family. Ilham Aliyev, the son of the incumbent president, was nominated as a candidate
and was running for presidency together with his father until the latter pulled out of the
race in favor of his son (Mydans 2003). According to the assessment of the election
monitoring mission, the 2003 vote was rigged in favor of the junior Aliyev
(OSCE/ODIHR 2003). Heydar Aliyev died soon after the election.
While it is highly likely that the death of the ruler will lead to regime collapse in
personalist (neopatrimonial) autocracies like Azerbaijan, there are three factors which
seem critical for accounting for the success and outcome of regime change in
neopatrimonial regimes: strength of regime soft-liners, the autonomy of the military,
and strength of the opposition (Snyder 1998). Economic performance perhaps is also
important. All of these conditions were missing in Azerbaijan on the eve of the
succession in 2003. The opposition was organizationally weak and divided, as will be
discussed in the next sections. Economic performance was ‘good enough’ (10.5 percent
real GDP growth). Regime soft-liners were simply absent, and the security forces and
the army lacked institutional autonomy.
If the history of initial regime formation is any lesson, previously the real threat
to the leader came from armed rebels (e.g. OPON) or from rivals from within the
regime with some relatively independent financial resources (e.g. the former
parliamentary speaker). In the Azerbaijani case, the military and security forces have
been loyal to the regime. To use Snyder’s language, the regime’s patronage network so
thoroughly “penetrates” the state that state institutions lack any autonomy and the
134
strategic elites are coopted through the extensive institutionalized patronage network
leaving no space for moderate opposition to emerge from within the elite. In other
words, Azerbaijan presents a situation in which the regime and the state apparatus are
merged into one hard-line actor. According to Snyder (1998, 51-52), regime hard-liners
are those who are “unconditionally committed to perpetuating the dictator’s rule”; soft-
liners are those actors within the regime who “perceive their survival to be separable
from the dictator’s… this often includes factions of the military and members of the
bureaucracy “alienated by the dictator’s interference with their autonomy and
professionalism”.
The military’s lack of institutional autonomy in Azerbaijan has “deeper”
historical and more proximal determinants. As mentioned earlier, the army was created
from scratch when the country emerged from the Soviet breakdown. Military personnel
lacked professional training. Around 1992, there were only 700 officers of Azerbaijani
nationality in the Soviet army on reserve (Fuller 1996, 127). An independent study
conducted around 2007-2008 described the armed forces as “fragmented, divided,
accountable-to-no-one-but-the-president, untransparent, corrupt and internally feuding”
(International Crisis Group 2008, 1). Alongside the army, there exist seven parallel
security structures which include “elements of the interior ministry and the state border
service and special units of the national security, justice, emergency situations and
defence industry ministries, as well as those of the special state protection service and
the national guard, directly under the president” (ICG 2008, 2-3). Safar Abiyev, the
minister of defense at that time, belonged to the ethnic Lezgin minority and was in
office since 1995 until he was dismissed in 2013. The longest serving defense minister
in the post-Soviet world, he was described as the “unsinkable general” due to his
“absolute and unswerving loyalty” to both presidents (Fuller and Giragosian 2010). In
sum, given unfavorable conditions regime change would have been difficult to achieve
in 2003.
After winning the 2003 presidential election, the junior Aliyev appeared to be
enjoying support of the elite loyalists, who backed the transfer of power in the critical
moment, but he was less secure than his father in his position as president (Economist
Intelligence Unit 2004). In 2005, in an effort to consolidate his power before the
parliamentary elections, the president sacked Farhad Aliyev, the minister of economic
135
development, who is believed to be reform-oriented as suggested by his campaign
against monopolies that dominate the Azerbaijani economy. The president also sacked
Rafig Aliyev, the brother of Farhad, who was head of Azpetrol private oil company.
Other members of the elite who were dismissed include Ali Insanov, the minister of
health, an ambitious political figure who was one of the founding fathers of the ruling
YAP party. Finally, the minister of national security Namiq Abbasov who helped the
senior Aliyev in the critical formative years was sacked and sent to serve as an
ambassador abroad.
In the case of Farhad Aliyev, it seems that the ex-minister’s attempts to promote
private sector reforms met opposition from those members of the elite who have
benefited from the status quo regime and feared economic wealth redistribution. But it
may also be that by excluding some of the elite members, including some of the older,
less trustworthy members, the president wanted to redistribute some of the wealth in
favor of new actors he brought to the elite to counterbalance the strength of the old
guard. As Isa Gambar, chairman of Musavat Party said with regard to the changes
within the elite: “On the one hand, the regime is getting rid of its internal political
opponents, and on the other hand we see a process of redistribution of wealth and
property in favor of high-placed figures loyal to Ilham Aliyev” (Holley 2007).
Despite these “purges”, the young leader kept some of the key members of his
father's old guard including Ramiz Mehdiyev (the chief of the presidential
administration since 1995), Ramil Usubov (interior minister since 1994), Zakir Garalov
(prosecutor general since 2000), Kamaladdin Heydarov (chairman of state customs
committee, 1995-2006, and minister of emergencies since 2006), and the less influential
prime minister Artur Rasizade (who has served as prime minister on-and-off since 1996
to the present). This points to some degree of continuity in the elite composition. As
Svante Cornell noted in this regard: “much of the [Ilham Aliyev’s] cabinet is dominated
by an old guard of ministers left over from Heydar’s rule” (Reuters 2011).
Finally, in October 2008, Ilham Aliyev won a landslide 89 percent of the vote in
the presidential vote in which the other six candidates received somewhere between 1-3
percent of the vote. The Azadliq (Freedom) bloc of main opposition parties boycotted
the election, citing the absence of a fair, level playing field. Several months after his re-
election for the second term in 2008, the political leadership initiated a constitutional
136
referendum to lift a two-term restriction on the presidency. The lift on term limits
allows Aliyev to run for the presidency indefinitely. Most likely by removing the term
restrictions the regime leadership wanted to prevent any potential challenge from arising
and running for presidential election in 2013. The move was also considered as the
leader’s attempt to enhance the incumbency advantages (Guliyev 2009b); that is,
bolstered by increased availability of patronage resources the leader acted to remove
previously adopted constraints on his incumbency advantages.
4.6.2. Societal opposition There seems to be general consensus that civil society in Azerbaijan is weak and
opposition parties not yet developed as strong political institutions. According to
Ottaway, there is “the almost complete absence of a mobilized civil society conscious of
its rights” and the opposition is weak (Ottaway 2003, 6). But whether the weakness of
civil society should be attributed to Soviet (or even pre-Soviet) legacies (Bertelsmann
Stiftung 2012) or to post-independence political structural conditions (Gahramanova
2009) remains a matter of debate. Perhaps both factors contributed to the weakness. But
it seems that, as Gahramanova demonstrates, while the period of glasnost created a
number of conditions favorable for the emergence of civil society organizations, the
(re)turn to (semi)authoritarianism since 1993 has prevented further development of civil
society due to increased government repression and more limitations with regard to
access to resources. In the early 2000s, there existed 1,400 registered NGOs in the
country. Between 150-400 of those NGOs were active (“effective actors on the national
or local scene”), and only 10-15 of them were considered to be “operating at a high
professional level” (Gahramanova 2009, 787; USAID 2005, 18).
The political opposition consists of some 40 small parties. It is organizationally
weak and hopelessly fragmented. Moreover, the number of parties reflects the number
of personalities “rather than forty distinct visions for Azerbaijan’s future” (Altstadt
1997, 147). These parties are organized around leaders rather than party platforms (ICG
2004). The main opposition parties with some degree of stability have been two splinter
parties: the Popular Front party (APF) and Musavat. They have been marginalized by
government repression (especially during the 2003 and 2005 elections) and the new
parliament convened after the 2010 election had no representatives of these two parties.
Considering the parliamentary election results, Azerbaijan’s party system can be
137
characterized as a “dominant authoritarian party system” in which one-party dominance
is maintained by non-democratic means and “alternation in power is only a theoretical
possibility” (Bogaards 2004, 178).
The weakness of the opposition may be seen as an outcome of both opposition
party strategies and regime repression. While the opposition parties could mobilize
thousands of people for their protests in the past, they still were organizationally
unimpressive. Splits within the Popular Front definitely contributed to the
organization’s weakness. But most important, it was the suppression by the government
that produced a situation starting from 1995 that although opposition candidates were
allowed to compete, their presence in the legislature has been extremely marginal. The
parliamentary election results show a strong tendency toward fluidity of parties (their
impermanence) and very limited representation of political opposition in the parliament.
Elections are routinely rigged in the incumbent’s and the ruling Yeni Azerbaycan
Party’s (YAP) favor.
Much has been written about opposition parties and their potential role in
delivering democratic change in general (Bunce and Wolchik 2010) and Azerbaijan,
specifically (Valiyev 2006; Aliyeva 2006), but it seems that the political opposition was
weak already by the time of the first legislative elections in 1995, in which the APF
party and Musavat together received only 5 seats in the 125-member Milli Mejlis (the
Azerbaijani legislative assembly). Despite mass protests in the aftermath of the
parliamentary elections in 2005, the chances of oppositional success were dim because
of its organizational weakness. Zardusht Alizade, a political leader, commented in 2005:
“The main executor of revolutionary processes in Azerbaijan, the national-democratic
opposition, is weak right now. It is divided and too poorly organized to stage a revolt”
(Associated Press 2005).
The November 2010 parliamentary election results confirmed the dominant
position of the pro-regime Yeni Azerbaijan Party. According to the poll results, YAP
won 71 seats, the so-called independents (most of them loyalists) - 41, and “official”
opposition parties (APF party and Musavat) gained no seats in the current legislature.
138
4.7. Continuity and coherence
Finally, elite interactions in Azerbaijan can be described by highlighting two
characteristic patterns: continuity and relative coherence. One indicator of elite
continuity is the fact that, after re-election in 2008, Aliyev reappointed his entire cabinet
with the exception of the minister of economic development (ICG 2010a, 4). As one
analyst observed, “[t]he continuity of leadership has been reflected in an extraordinary
continuity of ministers, with the great majority of ministers and heads of major state
institutions serving for a decade or more in either the same posts or other posts at the
same level” (Reed 2010, 11).
With regard to the relative coherence of the elite evidence is mixed, showing
that there are signs of both conflict and coherence. One area of potential conflict is
between members of the powerful ‘clans’ and the president. When he succeeded his
father in office in 2003, Ilham Aliyev was considered to be a weak leader who would be
controlled by more experienced politicians from his father’s old guard. The Polity IV
project (2008) noted in this regard, “[i]t remains unclear whether Ilham will run the
clan, as his father did, or the clan will run him” (Polity IV 2008).
There is also evidence suggesting that there is tension within the ruling elite (e.g.
Mirkadirov, 2004; Agayev, 2007), and that elite factions compete for more power and
influence. As power in the Azerbaijani context also implies access to enormous wealth,
generated by the influx of oil revenues, the elite conflict might be “fueled by the rivalry
over the division of oil money” (Leila Alieva, quoted in Falkowski, 2009). The rivalry
between the Yerazi and Nakhchivani factions has been noted by many analysts (e.g.
Mirkadirov, 2004; Peuch 2004). The president is seen as being interested in pitting one
elite group against another and serving as the final arbiter. This divide-and-rule strategy
enables him to prevent any of the rivaling factions strengthening or allying with another
fraction and posing a threat to his rule.
Immediately before the parliamentary elections in 2005 Ilham Aliyev ordered
the arrest of Farhad Aliyev (minister of economic development), Ali Insanov (minister
of health), Fikret Yusifov (finance minister) and several high-ranking officials for their
alleged collaboration with the former parliamentary speaker, now exiled, Rasul Guliyev
in plotting a coup d’état. Both Farhad Aliyev and Ali Insanov were considered to be
powerful oligarchs, while the latter was also the founding leader of the ‘Yerazi group’.
139
Then, during 2006, President Aliyev appointed two former businessmen Fizuli
Alakbarov and Azad Rahimov, as respectively the minister of labour and social
protection, and the minister of youth and sports. Some saw the decision to arrest the
ministers and the subsequent personnel changes as an effort by the president to get rid
of ambitious aspirants to presidential power and to replace them with more loyal, Baku-
raised, business-oriented oligarchs (ICG 2010a, 3). Others saw these decisions as
reflecting the ‘decentralization of power’ under Ilham Aliyev’s presidency, towards
greater influence of oligarchs and the head of the presidential administration
(Gahramanova 2009, 786).
On balance, however, the governing elite demonstrated more coherence than
conflict, especially in times of crises that could potentially imperil the rule of the entire
elite. We can see this ‘solidarity’ during the succession period, before and during the
presidential poll of 2003. Even though the rival challengers from within the elite could
have used the opportunity to seize power, they decided to support the transfer of power
to Heydar Aliyev’s son. Cheterian (2010, 104) notes that “[t]his transfer of power
within the Aliyev family […] reflected the agreement of key branches of the ruling cast.
It also reflected a certain cohesion within the ruling elite”. Hale (2006, 310) explains
that as the son of the outgoing president, Ilham Aliyev was “better positioned to assure
other, rival elite groups that he would maintain his father’s coalition”. Competing
factions within the ruling elite were able to reconcile their differences whenever they
faced a challenge to their leader’s (and therefore their own) hold on power, such as for
instance, during the contested parliamentary election in 2005. Rasizade (2004, 139)
suggests that, “[a] substantial number of people depend on patronage from the Aliyevs
for their privileged position and have a vested interest in retaining the regime in order to
preserve their illegally privatized property, illicit incomes and the wealth”. In a similar
vein, a US Embassy cable25 observes that “the President and his cohorts, who largely
were carried over from his father’s administration, now seek predictability, stability and
continuity to preserve and protect public and private fortunes”.
25 US Embassy cable (18 September 2009) President Ilham Aliyev – Michael (Corleone) on the outside, Sonny on the Inside, by Donald Lu, available at http://wikileaks.ch/cablegate.html, accessed 7 December 2010.
140
4.8. Conclusion
The main findings of this case study can be summarized as follows. First, the
Azerbaijani elite is organized as a network of patron-client relationships in which the
president uses patronage and other resources to ensure loyalty and support of members
of his ruling coalition. Data on public sector employment suggest that patronage
possibilities have been plentiful and the elites have been interested in keeping patronage
resources sufficiently supplied. Second, members of the president’s family and family
connections play crucial roles in Azerbaijan’s elite structure. Third, politics and
economics are fused in Azerbaijan in such a way that politicians from the ‘family’
group, as well as influential state officials, control significant segments of the country’s
economy. Fourth, the powerful elite groups whose fortunes depend heavily on their
connections with the current leadership have developed a vested interest in the
continuation of the regime and it therefore looks highly unlikely that these groups will
defect and turn against it. Finally, Azerbaijan’s elite displays patterns of continuity and
coherence. Elite coherence fostered by enormous patronage opportunities financed by
the ongoing oil boom can explain the relative stability of the Aliyev regime.
Starting from 1994, Azerbaijan received substantial amounts of FDIs and
bonuses. Between 1995 and 2000, the government received $673 million in oil bonuses
from foreign oil companies (calculated from IMF Republic of Azerbaijan Article IV
Consultation, various years.). The bonuses played a significant role in maintaining fiscal
balance before the oil boom. They were primarily used to finance budget deficits and,
between 1995 and 2000, oil bonuses covered on average 62 percent of budget deficits
(Bagirov et al. 2003, 100). In the period between 1995 and 2001, net FDI inflows in the
Azerbaijani economy were $3.7 billion (World Bank 2003). Most of FDIs went to the
state-controlled oil and gas sector and, according to Bayulgen, these inflows
“significantly empowered the political fortunes of authoritarian leaders by giving them a
symbolic vote of confidence from outside and stimulating economic growth” (Bayulgen
2005, 63).
Oil prices began to rise in 1999 and reached $64 per barrel in 2006. Azerbaijan
took advantage of high prices to the fullest. GDP growth was impressive between 2003
and 2008 reaching the world record high of 34.5 percent in 2006. What is clear,
however, is that high growth performance was driven largely by more than 60 percent
141
growth of oil GDP. Thanks to oil revenues, the state budget grew tenfold, from $1.2
billion in 2003 to more than $11 billion in 2010 (budget.az). GDP per capita increased
from below $2,000 levels in mid-1990s to more than $9,000 in 2010 (see Table 4.4).
Poverty rate was reduced significantly from nearly 50 percent in 2001 to 15.8 percent in
2008 (World Bank online).
Table 4.4. GDP per capita in Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia
GDP per capita at Purchasing Power Parity (PPP)
(current international $)
Source: World Bank database
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD
Table 4.5. Public finances in Azerbaijan
2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
(prelim.) (proj.)
Total Revenue 2.288 3.132 5.248 8.007 19.426 14.368 20.073
Oil Revenue 864 1.221 2.667 4.305 14.600 9.461 14.552
Non-Oil Revenue 1.425 1.922 2.585 3.701 4.826 4.907 5.521
Total Expenditure 2.207 2.839 5.134 7.356 11.829 12.027 12.466
Total Expenditure
(in percent of GDP) 26 23 27 26 31 35 30 Note: in million of Azerbaijani manat unless noted otherwise Source: IMF, Republic of Azerbaijan Article IV Consultation, various years
1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001
Azerbaijan $3,433 3,471 2,702 2,091 1,690 1,508 1,539 1,644 1,815 1,960 2,207 2,461
Armenia $2,122 1,955 1,183 1,128 1,243 1,388 1,520 1,619 1,775 1,872 2,035 2,287
Georgia $4,433 3,591 2,005 1,437 1,328 1,431 1,662 1,906 2,011 2,115 2,218 2,394
2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
2,746 3,096 3,478 4,496 6,176 7,86 8,714 9,499 9,943
2,635 3,070 3,485 4,096 4,782 5,591 6,098 5,320 5,463
2,584 2,951 3,220 3,611 4,044 4,687 4,905 4,776 5,073
142
With the start of the oil boom in 2003, as fiscal revenues increased, the government
embarked upon large expenditure. Since 2006 it tripled the level of spending to finance
public investment projects in social welfare sector, public sector salaries and
infrastructure projects (World Bank 2009). As Table 4.5 shows in 2009 government
revenue increased from 2 billion manats in 2004 to more than 19 billion manats. Oil
revenues accounted for the large part of this increase. From 2006 to 2008, total
expenditure almost doubled (from 5 billion manats to above 10 billion).
Although Azerbaijan is an old oil producer, it had little experience in managing
its oil wealth until 1991. During Soviet times, the oil revenue management was run by
Soviet central planners (Bagirov et al. 2003, 90). An important step in government’s
revenue management was the creation by a presidential decree of an oil fund in 1999 to
perform savings and stabilization functions. Since 2000, the State Oil Fund (SOFAZ)
has become an important fiscal policy instrument. Its assets have been used to finance
housing for refugees, infrastructural projects, student education abroad and the
government’s share in the BTC pipeline. Today SOFAZ’s funds exceed $30 billion, as
of October 2011 (SOFAZ). Based on the World Bank’s estimates, this may reach $100
billion in the next ten years (News.az 2011).
Expenditures from SOFAZ consist mainly of transfers to the budget (78 percent
of the total). As Table 4.6 shows, as of 2011 more than $32 billion were transferred
from the fund assets to the state budget. Transfers from SOFAZ to state budget
increased substantially since 2007 from 32 percent of budget revenue in 2008 to 60
percent in 2012 (Revenue Watch n.d.). This implies an increasing reliance of the budget
on transfers from SOFAZ which may have a negative influence on taxation (Aslanli
2012).
Table 4.6. State Oil Fund (SOFAZ) assets and transfers to the state budget Year Assets Transfers to budget
2000 270 …
2001 492 …
2002 692 …
2003 817 127
2004 964 165
143
2005 1.394 191
2006 1.455 745
2007 2.475 745
2008 11.219 4.838
2009 14.900 6.257
2010 22.767 7.530
2011 25.797 11.716
Total transfers: 32.314
Note: in millions of U.S. dollars; data on budget transfers converted to current (2012) U.S. dollars; 2011 figure projected. Source: SOFAZ Annual Report 2010, http://www.oilfund.az/pub/uploads/annual_2010en.pdf budget.az, http://www.budget.az/budget/main?content=526
SOFAZ was established both as a savings fund and a sterilization mechanism
against the Dutch disease. It is held to be clean and transparent, and was certified as
compliant by the EITI, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative
(http://eiti.org/Azerbaijan). It accumulates all revenues associated with post-Soviet
energy production abroad. SOFAZ also operates as a deficit financing source (World
Bank 2005, 16). It invests its funds in high quality securities abroad. SOFAZ
management consists of the President (of the Republic), SOFAZ’s Executive Director
(appointed by the president), and the Supervisory Board (also appointed by the
president). The Statute of SOFAZ, establishes the accountability of the fund directly to
the president. Only president “assigns” rights and responsibilities (article 1.6). The
assets of the fund are “utilized in accordance with the main directions … approved by
the President” (article 4.1). Moreover, any changes to the Statute should be approved by
the President (article 7) who has the sole power to liquidate the fund (article 8) (SOFAZ
Statue 2000).
In sum, as the analysis has shown, FDIs, bonuses and later oil fiscal revenues
played an important part in maintaining macroeconomic stability. For the regime that
relies on patronage, oil rents provided patronage resources (state sector jobs etc.) to
keep the elites loyal. Increased spending on coercive structures helped keep the
opposition weak. Oil revenues allowed the president to increase public spending and to
expand the patronage network which limited the political space for opposition.
144
Chapter 5. Oil, Personalism and Regime dynamics in Cameroon
5.1. Background
5.1.2. Introduction This Chapter examines the link between oil and democratization in Cameroon. A case
study of Cameroon shows that oil revenues helped sustain the Biya regime. Given the
personalist nature of the regime and thus the importance of patronage for its survival, oil
revenues were channeled to finance increases in public spending and expansion of the
public sector. The regime’s extreme personalism allowed the president to exercises
discretionary control of the revenues, which in the 1980s were kept in secret bank
accounts abroad, as well as their spending. When oil revenues declined and pro-
democracy protests erupted, the government adopted elections and other trappings of
democracy. Aid conditionality also played a role in the regime’s decision to allow for
multi-party elections. Yet, financial aid contributed by France and international
financial institutions (IFIs) helped Biya’s government withstand the critical 1991-92
years. Inconsistency in democracy promotion by western governments, aid
conditionality by IFIs and France’s economic and political support for the regime
reduced the effectiveness of Western leverage (Levitsky and Way 2010). When the
economy returned to normal and government revenues increased in the late 1990s and
especially since 2002 (due to high oil prices), the window of opportunity for democratic
change had been already missed and hegemonic authoritarianism set in as a new
equilibrium situation.
5.1.3. Regimes in oil-rich African states Most political regimes in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) today are electoral autocracies and
hybrid regimes (Van de Walle, 2002; Bratton 2013). As of 2012, 20 of the 51 Sub-
Saharan Africa were rated as “not free”, 20 as “party free”, and 11 as “free” by Freedom
House (2013). A large subset of these regimes is electoral autocracies in which
essentially authoritarian rule coexists with electoral competition (Schedler 2006a).
Unlike closed autocracies that ban political opposition parties and proscribe electoral
competition for the executive office and legislature, electoral autocracies – hegemonic
and competitive authoritarian regimes – hold multi-party elections. The difference
145
between the latter two is in the degree of certainty of election outcomes: in hegemonic
regimes, the outcome of elections is always predictably skewed in favor of the
incumbent candidate or ruling party. In competitive authoritarian regimes, contestation
is more meaningful with the possibility that the incumbent will be defeated (Roessler
and Howard 2009).
Much of the scholarly literature on these new types of authoritarianism has
focused on domestic players (incumbents and oppositions) and their strength and
strategies in the domestic electoral arena (Schedler 2002; contributions in Schedler
2006b; Howard and Roessler 2006; Bunce and Wolchik 2010). Levitsky and Way
(2010) emphasized external influences, Western linkage and leverage, in combination
with electoral strength of the incumbent regime/ruling party in determining the
trajectories of competitive autocracies.
A parallel literature on the politics of natural resources (Ross 2001, 2012; Jensen
and Wantchekon 2004) has argued that certain types of natural resources, notably
petroleum wealth (oil and natural gas), impede democratic processes in oil-rich
authoritarian regimes by empowering the incumbents through increased patronage
spending and repression and other mechanisms. In countries with high oil revenues,
“stubborn” authoritarianism is the rule and authoritarian breakdowns are a rare
phenomenon (Smith 2006). In short, the recent “political resource curse” theory
suggests that under certain conditions oil rents increase the likelihood of authoritarian
survival.
Table 5.1. Oil production in the Gulf of Guinea states
(in thousand barrels per day) Country
Production levels Start date
Year 1980 volume/peak year Year 2012
Angola 150 2014.3 (2008) 1,872 1955
Cameroon 58 185 (1985) 63.5 1977
Chad 0 176.7 (2005) 104.5 2003
Congo, Republic of 65 311.9 (2010) 291.9 1957
Equatorial Guinea 0 368.5 (2007) 318 1991
Gabon 176 370.3 (1997) 242 1956
Nigeria 2,060 2630.9 (2005) 2,524.10 1958
Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration;
http://www.mbendi.com/indy/oilg/ogus/af/ga/p0005.htm#OtherCountries
146
Sub-Saharan African evidence lends support for the political oil curse thesis.
The region is home to seven major oil-exporting states geographically concentrated in
the Gulf of Guinea: Angola, Cameroon, the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), Gabon
and Nigeria are old oil producers; in Equatorial Guinea and Chad production of oil
began in 1991 and 2003 respectively (see Table 5.1). Oil is expected to generate $350
billion in revenue for these seven countries over the period of 2002-2019 (Mañe 2004).
Cross-national statistical evidence suggests that African oil exporters are less likely to
democratize than their oil-poor counterparts in the world (Ross 2012) and their own
region (Jensen and Wantchekon 2004). All seven oil producing countries are not
democracies: Nigeria and Chad have competitive authoritarian regimes; Cameroon, the
Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon have hegemonic regimes, and
Angola is classified as closed regime (see Table 5.2).
Table 5.2. Political regimes in the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea states Country Regime type
pre-Cold
war window of opportunity -1990s current (at 2006)
Angola
Closed
(-->1991) Collapsed (1992-96), Closed (1997-->) Closed
Cameroon
Closed
(-->1991) Competitive (1992-96), Hegemonic (1997-->) Hegemonic
Chad
Closed
(-->1991) Competitive (1996-->) Competitive
Congo,
Republic of
Closed
(-->1991)
Competitive (1992-96), Collapsed (1997), Closed
(1998-2001)
Hegemonic
(2002--)
Equatorial
Guinea
Closed
(-->1995) Hegemonic (1996-->) Hegemonic
Gabon
Closed
(-->1992) Competitive (1993-2004)
Hegemonic
(2005--)
Nigeria
Closed
(-->1998) Closed (-->1998)
Competitive
(1999-->)
Note: The coding of political regimes, covering the 1987-2006 period, is by Roessler and Howard (2009).
Source: Roessler and Howard 2009.
147
There are also differences in the structure of these regimes in terms of the type
of formal and informal institutional configuration of power. Applying Geddes’ typology
yields 4 (out of 11) regimes based on personal rule (Cameroon under Biya, Equatorial
Guinea under Obiang, Congo under Sassou Nguesso, and Chad under Deby) and its
combination with either military (as in Nigeria during Abacha’s rule) or single party (as
in Congo up to the early 1990s as well as Gabon until today), two cases of single party
rule (Angola - thus its designation as closed regime noted above; Cameroon under
Ahidjo), and two military regime spells in Nigeria before Abacha (see Table 5.3). Thus,
most of Africa’s oil rich regimes (7 of 11) are characterized by either pure personal rule
or display strong personalist tendencies. A typical African oil-rich state today is an
electoral autocracy with strong personalism. Notice also that democratic elections that
were held only in two countries (Congo in 1992 and Nigeria in 1979) produced short-
lived governments that were quickly replaced by new authoritarian regimes. In sum,
democratic experiments in oil-rich states in sub-Saharan Africa were not sustainable and
most changes occurred within the authoritarian regimes affecting either the
competitiveness dimension or governance structure.
Table 5.3. Geddes regime coding of the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea states Angola: (1976–1990) – single–party, People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola
(MPLA); (1992–1996) – interregnum or anarchy; (1997–->) – single–party, MPLA.
Cameroon: (1961–1982) – single-party, Cameroon National Union (CNU, later renamed
Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement, CPDM); (1982–->) – personal, Biya.
Chad: (1990-->) -- personal, Deby.
Congo, Republic of: (1968–1992) – single-party/military, Congolese Workers Party (PCT);
(1992–1996) – electoral democracy; (1997–->) – personal, Sassou Nguesso (also president,
1979–1992).
Equatorial Guinea: (1979–->) – personal, Obiang.
Gabon: (1960–->) – single-party/personal, Gabonese Democratic Party (PDG), Bongo family.
Nigeria: (1966–1979) – military; (1979–1983) – electoral democracy; (1983–1993) – military;
(1993–1999) – military/personal, Abacha/Abubakr.
Sources: Geddes 1999; Brownlee 2009
148
In other words, most oil-rich regimes exhibit remarkable durability (Cameroon,
Chad, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea), whereas in cases where regimes transformed due to
civil war (Angola), military coup (Cameroon, Nigeria) or democratic elections
(Nigeria), they were quickly replaced by another authoritarian government. For
example, in Cameroon during the early 1980s oil boom, Ahmadou Ahidjo peacefully
stepped down to give power to his designated successor Paul Biya. But 2 years later
Ahidjo’s supporters in the military staged a violent coup prompting a change in the
regime towards greater concentration and personalization of power. In sum, even after
adopting electoral rules of the game, Africa’s oil-rich states remained in essence
authoritarian and resisted democratic change.
5.1.4. The oil-personal rule link As discussed in previous chapters, personalist rulers govern by providing patronage to
their supporters, therefore more oil revenues imply greater patronage opportunities.
Personalist regimes are particularly vulnerable to any dramatic exogenous economic
shocks that could disrupt “the material underpinnings of regime loyalty” (Geddes 1999,
122). Chehabi and Linz (1998, 27) suggest that there can be a link between oil and
neopatrimonial (sultanistic) governance.
In African oil states, party-based regimes are rare and where a single party
dominates, regime consolidation preceded oil (as in Angola). In those countries that
started out as personalist regimes, personalism persists after the oil’s onset. In some oil-
rich regimes constraining institutions (a single party or the military) weakened over
time and regimes became more personalized as in Cameroon under Paul Biya in the
early 1980s during the oil boom, in the Republic of Congo under Sassou Nguesso’s
return to power 1997 and possibly Angola, Africa’s only pure party-based regime (see,
e.g. Hodges 2004; de Morais 2011). All these examples suggest that in some cases the
oil windfalls tend to promote the “personalization” of previously institutionalized forms
of authoritarian rule.
5.2. Cameroon case study
5.2.1. Introduction How exactly does oil influence regime change/stability in African states? To answer
this question, I explore the oil-regime link in Cameroon, a case that fits the typical
149
African oil-rich regime and is often seen as paradigmatic case of the “resource curse”.
My primary method is within-case study analysis with the use of process-tracing
techniques.
Cameroon is comparatively modest oil producer (around 180,000 barrels per day
in the peak year of 1985), but oil is one of Cameroon’s major exports and accounts for a
significant part of government revenue (Cossé 2006). Moreover, Cameroon is
considered as an example of perverse effects of oil abundance and often cited as a
textbook case of the resource curse (Acemoglu and Robinson 2013). Traditionally a
cash crop exporter, Cameroon started oil exports in the late 1970s by which time the
country’s first president Ahidjo had consolidated his regime. Ahidjo’s rule was based
on four pillars: coercion, patronage, a single party, and French support. Ahidjo’s
patronage network included elite representatives of all major ethnic groups. A
moderately strong political party was created to support the regime. Good prices for
coffee and cacao stimulated moderate economic growth and political stability. Oil
discoveries in the late 1970s transformed the economy. Beginning from 1978 oil
provided for a substantial share of government fiscal revenues. When the country was
entering the oil boom stage, Ahidjo resigned from his position, took over the
chairmanship of the ruling Cameroon National Union (CNU) party, and peacefully
transferred power to his successor Biya, possibly (mis)calculating that he would make
the CNU the center of power and policy-making. In 1983-84, the rivalry between the
two leaders led to the mutiny by pro-Ahidjo officers in the military crashed by force.
After the coup, Biya reshuffled the government and party elites placing loyalists to key
policy positions in the government and the ruling party. The place of the party in the
decision-making diminished and greater emphasis was put on loyalties personally to
Biya. Under Biya power was more centralized and corruption proliferated more
extensively. The public sector expanded enormously. All this was achieved with the
help of the oil windfalls. In the mid-1980s, commodity prices went down and the
Cameroonian economy entered the period of economic downturn.
In the early 1990s, a confluence of external pressures, strong domestic
opposition and lingering economic crisis forced the government of Biya to introduce
multiparty elections. In the 1992 parliamentary election, boycotted by the main
opposition Social Democratic Front (SDF) party but widely regarded as relatively
150
competitive, opposition parties gained nearly a half of parliamentary seats and the ruling
Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (CPDM) party had to form a coalition with
a small party to acquire a slim majority. In the presidential vote held in the autumn of
1992, there was a standoff between the incumbent and the main opposition challenger
John Fru Ndi (SDF). Biya won narrowly. However, by the mid-1990s Biya and the
ruling party managed to regain hegemony and majority representation in the parliament.
Why and how the Biya regime survived? Levitsky and Way (2010) argue that
even though the Biya regime was patronage-based and therefore highly vulnerable to
fiscal crisis, it withstood economic downturn well. Western leverage, a crucial driver for
democratization, was limited. France played the role of the “dark knight” and supported
Biya and the status quo. French aid, they note (262-3), “allowed [the Biya government]
to pay soldiers and civil servants throughout the 1991 crisis” and saved the regime from
collapse. However, this was not the only source of Biya regime’s survivability. Oil
revenue was crucial by helping Biya cement his elite coalition and concentrate powers
after he assumed the office in 1982. Western leverage was stronger through the late
1980s and early 1990s when Cameroon was plunged into economic crisis. During this
period, conceding to the democratizing pressures from Western governments and
international financial institutions (IFIs), Biya partly released the safety valves:
opposition parties were legalized and pluralist elections were allowed. As the
government’s economic situation improved by the mid-1990s due to French and IFIs’
financial support and the rising oil prices (especially after 2003), the effectiveness of
Western leverage weakened. This reduced the costs of maintaining autocratic rule and
the regime successfully re-equilibrated.
Apart from external factors, however, domestic political regime structure was
even more important. Following Soares de Oliveira (2006, 2007) and Basedau (2005), I
argue that both ex-ante (pre-oil) and ex-post context was crucial. Before the arrival of
oil, the regime’s high levels of personalism/ patrimonialism were a strong impediment
to democratization. Oil added to this by aggravating the pre-existing “pathologies”
associated with neopatrimonialism. As note above, there is an “elective affinity”
between personal rule and resource dependence: oil rents and personal rule are highly
compatible and mutually reinforcing. Oil feeds the patronage network built around the
president and personalist regimes’ elites benefit from rent-seeking opportunities that oil
151
presents them with. That is why, perhaps, it should not be surprising that many mineral-
exporting states in Africa and elsewhere preserve resource-based economies for decades
failing to diversify away from primary resource exports (Dunning 2005). Oil feeds
personalism, and personalism in turn promotes oil resource dependence. Personalism in
conjunction with oil is path-dependent.
Comparative studies show that personalist autocracies are associated with a set
of perverse economic outcomes, such as poor economic growth, high levels of
corruption, and poor governance. Most important, compared with more corporate and
bureaucratized forms of authoritarianism, personalist regimes have been found to be
especially resistant to democratic change and are more likely, than other forms of
authoritarianism, to be replaced by other types of nondemocratic rule when regime
change occurs. In fact, as the large-N analysis in Chapter 3 demonstrates, personalist oil
autocracies worldwide never transitioned to democracy over the period of 1950-2010
(author’s own calculations). In the Cameroonian case, even during fiscal crisis,
mitigated with French and IFIs financial support, limited resources were used to benefit
the state-fed patronage network tied to the public sector and security forces. Fiscal crisis
affected the living standards of the ordinary people and to a much lesser extent the
fortunes of the state elites. Concessions were made – multi-party contestation allowed –
but the regime leadership moved quickly to regain control benefitting from a surge in
world oil prices beginning from the 2000s.
5.2.2. Pre-oil context: Authoritarian state-building under Ahidjo On independence, Cameroon shared many of the typical features of post-colonial sub-
Saharan Africa: ethnic heterogeneity of the population, the lack of democratic
experience in the past, challenges of nation- and state-construction, a distorted economy
oriented towards exports of primary commodities, economic dependence on the former
colonial power and other characteristics. Present day’s Cameroon was formed as a new
state after the declaration of independence by the former French-administered territory
of Cameroon and its subsequent merger with the southern part of former British
Cameroon in 1961. Cameroon is home to more than 250 ethno-cultural groups. Its
population is divided into three religious confessions (Muslims in the north, Christians
and animists in the central and south regions), and linguistically between the
152
Anglophone minority concentrated in the western regions and the Francophone majority
in the rest of the country.
Ahmadou Ahidjo, who first served as prime minister between 1958-60, was the
first president of independent Cameroon. Ahidjo was a French speaker from the Fulani
ethnic minority group from the predominantly Muslim north. His 20 years autocratic
rule was a period of relative political and economic stability. Ahidjo’s leadership was
based on the dominant position of the ruling party, tight control of the state’s military
and security forces and his ability to maintain a balance and support of a multi-ethnic
elite coalition.
As in other African authoritarian regimes of the cold-war era, Ahidjo’s rule was
supported by the single official party. The ruling Cameroon National Union (CNU)
party was established in 1966, the same year that all other existing parties were
outlawed. Ahidjo was the head of CNU during his presidency and for a short time after
resigning from presidency in 1982. Single-party rule that was common in most African
states during the Cold War was justified by political leaders like Nyerere of Tanzania,
Nkrumah of Ghana and Ahidjo of Cameroon as necessary to restrain centrifugal
tendencies and to avoid politicization of ethnicity that could result from multypartyism
in multi-ethnic societies (Mbaku and Takougang 2004, 3). In practice, however, these
autocratic restrictions and party hegemony were part of the familiar “politics of the
belly” (Bayart 1993) whereby rulers turn the state apparatus into “an instrument of
plunder”, “a corrupt, patrimonial system in which resource allocation became highly
politicized” (Mbaku and Takougang 2004, 6).
The unusually high level of ethno-linguistic-regional heterogeneity made ethno-
regional and linguistic cleavage a salient factor in Cameroonian politics. Although such
cleavages might have contributed to the onset of civil war in other African states, they
have so far not endangered stability in Cameroon –partly because of Ahidjo’s efforts to
reduce the saliency of ethnicity (Fearon and Laitin 2005). By building a delicate multi-
ethnic alliance and giving each major ethnic group a stake in the system, Ahidjo
managed to avoid inter-ethnic conflict. This policy was continued by his successor
President Biya.
In the first formative years, the main challenge to Ahidjo’s leadership came from
the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC), the anti-colonial movement that was
153
banned by French authorities in the 1950s. The UPC was launched as pro-independence
movement in 1948 in the western regions and was ruthlessly suppressed by the French.
Thousands of locals (mainly Bamileke people) were massacred. The UPC continued
military struggle after independence pushing for complete independence from French
rule and against French economic and commercial interests in the country (Takougang
2004a, 67). Trying to keep its military strategic presence and to preserve its commercial
interests in the former colonies, France supported moderate groups, like the Parti des
Democrates Camerounais (PDC) and the Union Camerounaise (UC), and opposed
radical groups like the UPC. The French government supported Ahidjo for he was
widely considered to be pro-France. By the early 1970s the UPC forces were defeated
marking the end of the “implicit civil war”. Thus, supported by France, Ahidjo was able
to consolidate his rule by 1972 and is widely thought to have acted as a protégé of
France thereafter. One effect of the civil war was that it helped create a strong military
loyal to Ahidjo (Fearon and Laitin 2005, 10).
Under Ahidjo, Cameroon had a highly centralized form of government modeled
after de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic (LeVine 1986, 22). The 1972 constitution replaced
federalism with unitary administration and divided the territory into 8 Francophone and
2 Anglophone provinces (the Northwest and Southwest) (Dicklitch 2002). The new
constitution centralized power in the capital Yaounde and concentrated decision-making
in the presidency and more precisely in the hands of president Ahidjo. Under his rule,
centralization and concentration of power “was so thorough and complete that his
ministers could not even initiate any policy without the president’s approval” (Mbaku
2002, 136). Anglophone politicians and their political group (Southern Cameroons
National Council (SCNC)) saw these policies to centralize power as further steps
toward economic and political marginalization of the Anglophones.
Ahidjo’s autocratic rule was based on a mixture of repression (with the help of
repressive police institutions, notably the Brigades Mixtes Mobile (BMM) and Service
de documentation (SEDOC) and patronage. Most important, Ahidjo managed to
maintain a balanced multi-ethnic coalition network (LeVine 1986, 23). Since the state
played a major role in the economic model of planned liberalism, Ahidjo’s official
economic doctrine, state resources were available for cementing the “ethno-religious
client network” (Mbaku 2002). State patronage was used for bribing and neutralizing
154
competing leaders and coopting influential regional ethno-regional elites (LeVine cited
in Mbaku 2002, 136). Thus, President Ahidjo:
“cultivated a highly paid and privileged ethno-regional client network that enhanced his ability to monopolize political power in the country. This was a sophisticated patronage system with Ahidjo as its head or grand baron. Below him were several ethnic barons, which were serving as spokesmen for their respective ethnic groups. Each baron secured the support of his constituency for Ahidjo, and in exchange, was rewarded handsomely - such rewards usually included public projects for the respective constituency and a chance for the baron to engage in personal enrichment” (Mbaku 2002).
Kofele-Kale (1986, 77) makes a similar observation noting that “the ethnic arithmetic
formula for distributing political power was in reality a sophisticated patronage system
through which ethnic groups were transformed into pressure groups.” Ahidjo’s
patronage system, according to Kofele-Kale (1986), “included, in varying combinations,
leaders of critical southern and western ethnic groups, his own northern allies,
businessmen, traditional chiefs and magnates, and members of the country’s
intelligentsia” (cited in Mbaku 2002). The Ahidho’s system included representatives of
almost all major ethnic groups (Takougang 2004a, 75). LeVine (1986, 35) notes the
“relative elite stability” at the government level in the 1970s after constitutional changes
transformed Cameroon into a unitary republic.
5.2.3. Biya’s rule (up to the early 1990s) In an unusually peaceful transfer of power in 1982, Ahidjo announced his resignation
and allowed his handpicked successor former Prime Minister Paul Biya to take over the
presidency. After leaving the office, Ahidjo kept the position of the party chairman of
CNU for himself. Later it became apparent that by controlling the party, he intended to
rule from behind the scenes. As the party chairman he tried “to assert the primacy of the
CNU over the government” (Mbaku 2002, 137). Biya refused to accept the supremacy
of his former chief. In 1983, Ahidjo blocked a number of policies proposed by Biya and
went on to publicly assert the primacy of the party over the government. Feeling
increasingly threatened by Ahidjo’s ambitions to dominate Biya first reacted by sacking
six of Ahidjo’s fideles from the government in 1983 and taking over the chairmanship
155
of the ruling party (Ahidjo fled the country) (LeVine 1986, 36). In 1984, a group of pro-
Ahidjo officers staged a military coup against Biya. The attempted coup was defeated
with the help of a group of pro-Biya officers in the presidential guard. Biya accused the
exiled former president Ahidjo of plotting the coup.
Captain Guerandi Mbara, one of the coup organizers, explained the rationale for
the coup citing the “legitimacy crisis”, the failing state, corruption and plundering of
public resources and noted the continuity of the system: “Some argue that [at the time of
the coup] Paul Biya had not yet found his bearing. Granted. But do they realize that
Paul Biya is the continuation of the system? He has [been] an important player within
the system since 1962. When he became president he was well versed in the arcane
mysteries of power” (Tande 2009).
The coup was a turning point in Biya’s presidency. As a measure against
possible conspiracies in the future, he purged the ministries from Ahidjo’s supporters.
As a result, the high-rank government members were “almost completely replaced”
(LeVine 1986, 24). Then, in 1985, he called for a session of the ruling party in which its
name was changed to Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (CPDM). Le Vine
(1986) argues that even though after the coup Biya replaced the top echelons of elites
with his own loyalists from the South, he followed Ahidjo’s policy of preserving ethnic
balance. Moreover, Takougang (2004b, 104) notes that Biya was slow in replacing
Ahidjo’s officers and even reappointed some of Ahidjo’s close associates whom he
dismissed earlier. Some argue that since the coup was backed by Ahidjo’s northern
elites, Biya decided to weaken the power of the northern regions. For example, by one
of his decrees the previously single territorial unit of Northern region was divided into
three provinces: Adamawa, North, and Far/Extreme North (Dicklitch 2002).
Biya also purged the officers’ corps from Ahidjo’s loyalists and replaced them
with the officers loyal to him. He also granted them promotions and privileges and
during the crisis he made sure the high-ranking military and security officers were not
affected by pay cuts (ICG 2010b, 8). What followed after the 1984 coup is that Biya
“centralize[d] and personalize[d] power even more than Ahidjo” (Dicklitch 2002). The
coup also influenced Biya’s plan known as a New Deal program meant to promote
“rigor and moralization”. The new program declared fight against corruption and
nepotism in the public service as its priorities. The program was not successful though
156
as levels of corruption actually increased. In his first years after assuming office, Biya
allowed press freedom, but instead of addressing real public problems all criticism was
only directed at pointing out Ahidjo’s mistakes (Mbaku 2002). This way press freedom
served to fight political rivals rather than engage in real public deliberation of social
issues. Another change in the single party system was the introduction of the right to
compete within the single party. In 1983, Biya amended the constitution to allow
multiple candidates to run for presidency. However, procedures for qualifying were
very complicated: a candidate was supposed to present a petition signed by 500 public
officials, 50 from each of the 10 provinces. Moreover, “signing a petition to allow
someone to challenge the president would be seen as a sign of disloyalty” [because
public officials owed their jobs to the president/CPDM], therefore it is no surprise that
there never emerged a candidate to compete against Biya in polls (Mbaku 2002, 141).
The new rules were also introduced for electing parliament members. As a result, new
faces emerged but all candidates were screened and approved by the Political Bureau of
the CPDM. This system worked to ensure that only loyal individuals were elected.
To sum up, Biya’s administration demonstrates a great deal of continuity in both
elites and governing practices with Ahidjo’s regime. Executive power concentration,
extensive clientelism, and reliance on massive distribution of state resources are
characteristic elements of Biya’s neopatrimonial rule (Van de Walle 1994; Gabriel
1999). Ethnic balancing seems to be an important part of this governance mechanism:
“thanks to the policy and politics of regional and ethnic balance which Ahidjo
instituted, borrowing from and reforming the colonial legacy of ‘decentralized
despotism’, and which Biya has perfected, Cameroon has become a country much easier
to govern than it is to run a family” (Nyamnjoh 1999, 105-106).
5.3. The economic and political effects of the oil boom In the period between 1965-1985, Cameroon had a modest but relatively stable
economic growth performance with an average GDP growth rate of 5% though highly
inequitable one with high income inequalities and poverty. In 1984, 40% of the
population lived in poverty. Compared with other African countries, the Cameroonian
economy performed relatively well: GNP per capita was $880 ranking highest in the
region. The agricultural sector (coffee, cacao, and cotton) dominated the economy.
Agriculture employed more than 80% of the population and accounted for 32% of GDP.
157
The export of cash crops accounted for 72% of total export revenue (Benjamin and
Devarajan 1985; IIEP 1990, 1).
Figure 5.1. Oil production in Cameroon
Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration
http://www.eia.gov/countries/country-data.cfm?fips=CM#pet
From 1978 to the mid-1980s, economic growth was fueled by an increase in oil
production from the offshore fields in the Rio del Rey basin involving French Elf-
Aquitaine. Production peaked in 1985 (see Figure 5.1). Cameroon began to receive
revenues from oil exports in 1978, when Ahidjo was still president (Figure 5.2). In
1980, oil revenues accounted for less than 5% of state income; between 1981-1985, oil
revenues accounted for nearly 40% of total government revenues (Subramanian 1994)
(see Table 5.4). The economy grew at an annual rate of 11.5 % from 1976 to 1981 and
about 6% from 1982 to 1985 (Subramanian 1994). During this period, Cameroon was a
significant (100,000 barrels per day) producer but many expected the oil boom to be
temporary and that the reserves would be depleted by the early 1990s (IIEP 1990).
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 200
1980
1982
1984
1986
1988
1990
1992
1994
1996
1998
2000
2002
2004
2006
2008
2010
2012
Cameroon - total oil production 1980-2012 (in thousand barrels per day)
158
Figure 5.2. Cameroon: Petroleum income per capita in US dollars
Source: Ross 2013
The oil revenue had some of the Dutch disease effects (i.e. harmful effects on
tradable sectors) on the Cameroonian economy. Benjamin and Devarajan (1985) found
that the real exchange rate appreciation had a negative impact only on the traditional
agricultural sectors of cacao and coffee. Historically dependent on the cash crops (with
all foreign exchange being generated from exporting coffee and cacao), the
Cameroonian economy was vulnerable to commodity price fluctuations. Oil export was
seen as a good way to diversify the sectoral structure of exports. The oil sector was not
a substitute for agriculture (especially for generating jobs) given the oil sector’s enclave
nature, reliance on imported materials, foreign technologies and expertise. But oil has
one peculiar effect: it generates an influx of large revenues (the windfall effect) and
stimulates the incentives of politicians for vast public spending. In the year of 1982
when Biya succeeded Ahidjo, oil expenditure amounted to $1 billion (15 % of GDP)
(Benjamin and Devarajan 1985). Transfers and subsidies to “loss-making public
enterprises” constituted much of government expenditures in that period (Subramanian
1994).
0
50
100
150
200
250
300
350
400
1961 1965 1969 1973 1977 1981 1985 1989 1993 1997 2001 2005 2009
Petroleum Income Per Capita (Ross)
159
Table 5.4. Cameroon - Oil revenue
(in percentage of government revenue)
1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994
8.0 40.1 46.4 43.4 38.5 41.9 38.6 34.8 33.8 30.5 31.9 40.3 36.4 25.9 18.2
1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007
20.1 21.8 28.7 19.6 21.0 33.4 27.0 28.8 24.5 25.8 28.5 35.5 33.8
Source: Gauthier and Zeufack 2010, 56
The oil revenues had an impact on the economy primarily as a source of
government export revenues. And although the direct impact of oil on employment was
small (about 3,000 jobs in the oil sector in 1986), oil revenues had a substantial indirect
impact on employment (such as large construction projects) generating about 20,000
new jobs annually in the private and para-state sectors in addition to 8,000 annually in
the public sector (IIEP 1990, 87). A sizable share of oil income was used to finance the
increased number of civil servants and public/para-state enterprises (IIEP 1990, 84).
Government expenditure increased to satisfy the rising demands. Between 1984-86, the
government went on a spending spree increasing expenditure on transfers and pay rises
for civil servants and other expenditures (Gauthier and Zeufack 2009) (see Table 5.5).
By 1988, there were 150 parastatals. These parastatals served to reward positions of
power to loyal supporters and “were converted into prebends for Directors-General or to
serve other exclusive interests of the hegemonic class. Given this penchant of the
parastatals to promote political rather than economic goals, it is not astonishing at all
that, for the most part, they performed inefficiently” (Konings 1996, 249). Their
operations were financed by subsidies which by 1988 amounted to about FCFA 150
billion per year.
It is worth noting that oil revenue management was highly centralized, opaque
and secretive. In the 1980s, oil revenue was not included in the government budget,
except for tax of foreign companies, and most of it was saved on special bank accounts
abroad - compte hors budget-CHB – under the exclusive discretion of the president
(IIEP 1990, 23; Van de Walle 1994). Some believe that secrecy was “a scam” to cover
the transfer of funds to private pockets of the officials (Gauthier and Zeufack 2009).
As noted above, when Biya succeeded Ahidjo his position was less secure
because he had to subordinate the old elites from Ahidjo’s coalition. In addition, he was
160
from the southern region, which was politically marginal under Ahidjo. Moreover,
residents of Biya’s ethnic region had high expectations in terms of improving their
living standards, so Biya had to accommodate their rising demands as well. To deal
with these rising demands, Biya acted to promote people from his Beti and Bulu ethnic
groups, concentrated around the capital Yaounde, to high-ranking positions in the
military, government, the party and parastatal enterprises (Dicklitch 2002). The number
of civil servants increased from about 80,000 in 1982 to about 180,000 in 1988 and the
majority of the new employees were recruited among the Beti (Konings 1996, 251-52).
Biya’s support coalition was still multi-ethnic, as during Ahidjo, but the Beti group now
had a dominant position. In sum, the role of oil wealth during the early period of Biya’s
presidency was important in a reducing the risk of potential elite rupture, empowering
the new authoritarian leader, and allowing him to strengthen his and his group’s
position in the elite network. Oil revenues controlled exclusively by Biya allowed him
to mitigate rising distributive pressures and accommodate elites (Van de Walle 1993).
Table 5.5. Cameroon - government revenue, oil revenue, and government
expenditure (in billions of CFA francs)
1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986
Government revenue 200.6 226.6 338.9 491.1 620.5 711.4 765.4 966.1 808.6
of which Oil revenue n.a n.a 27.1 197.1 288.0 308.7 294.3 404.9 311.8
Government expenditure 181.1 207.0 334.3 469.0 550.3 663.3 767.1 982.0 1089.8
1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996
655.1 579.6 524.7 454.3 466.3 462.9 430.8 353.1 533.5 654.7
227.7 195.7 160.0 145.0 187.9 168.7 111.5 64.3 107.4 142.8
1004.4 768.5 624.8 642.9 597.9 518.8 457.2 534.8 632.3 665.7
1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007
828.5 862.9 928.1 1313.4 1251.4 1282.2 1321.1 1311.3 1541.4 1808.9 1867.9
238.0 168.9 194.5 438.3 337.5 368.9 324.1 337.8 439.2 643.0 631.0
789.5 758.7 838.9 1011.9 1211.5 985.1 984.8 1063.6 1195.4 1372.0 1541.0
Source: Gauthier and Zeufack 2010, 56
161
5.4. The economic crisis and political liberalization When the world oil prices as well as prices for coffee and cacao fell in the mid-1980s,
the Cameroonian economy was hard hit. The terms of trade worsened in 1985 and the
oil boom period ended in 1986. GNP per capita in 1998 fell to the 1975 level of
$646. The exogenous shock had a negative effect on public revenues and the Biya
government had difficulty financing many of the publicly financed programs launched
under the New Deal program: “The state’s offices and treasury ceased to provide
orderly, profitable circuits for the well-connected, opportunistic patrons and clients.
Pay-offs yielded to ripoffs as public goods and services, above all parastatals, became
targets” (Krieger 1994, 606-607). As a consequence, state resources dwindled
significantly limiting the number of people who could receive benefits. Another effect
of the crisis was that Biya’s network was (perceived to be) less ethnically balanced than
Ahidjo’s and when competition for state resources increased by 1990, Biya’s Beti ethnic
group which constituted less than 10% of Cameroon’s population, but politically
dominant in the Center, South, and East regions were perceived as exclusive
beneficiaries of the limited resource (Krieger 1994, 606).
Several factors explain the crisis onset: unfavorable commodity prices;
inefficiency in public spending during the booming years (e.g. expansion of the public
employment sector and the unprofitable parastatals); the government’s policy failures in
reinvesting the gains from commodity exports to develop more sustainable profitable
industries; and corruption.
Biya largely continued Ahidjo’s economic policy of planned liberalism centered
on state-led growth and import-substitution policies but changed its name to communal
liberalism. This policy was not successful and contributed to the crisis. Economic
decline was further exacerbated by government inefficiency, mismanagement and an
overly-expanded public sector: “the negative influence of the public sector in the
economy – far more than falling world prices for Cameroonian commodities – has been
the principal cause of economic decline and lack of competitiveness” (USAID 1993, 3).
Corruption also contributed to economic decline. Cameroon is constantly ranked among
the states with highest levels of perceived corruption on Transparency International’s
Corruption Perception Index. The magnitude of corruption under Biya increased. Even
though there was corruption before Biya “it has never been as generalized, extensive
162
and deep-rooted as it is today”. In today’s Cameroon top civil servants are driven by the
desire “grab as much as you can and as fast as you can before the party is over” [you
sacked] (Mbaku and Takougang 2004, 21). Konings (1996, 251-52) notes that
“corruption and rent-seeking had always been fundamental characteristics of the
regime; after 1984 they increased to the point of becoming dysfunctional. When this
political conjuncture was combined with a severe exogenous economic shock, the
system started to crumble.”
“La crise” and the pro-democracy protests in the neighboring countries triggered
protests in Cameroon and Biya had to open up the space for opposition: opposition
parties were legalized and multiparty elections introduced. Due to the crisis, popular
support for the president and the ruling party went down. In the early 1990s, forces
opposing Biya launched a civic disobedience campaign and a strike – operation “Villes
Mortes” (Ghost Towns) which lasted until January 1992. In 1992, economic conditions,
which already were poor, deteriorated still further: state revenues declined, GDP fell by
10%, living standards and incomes declined substantially.
In the first competitive parliamentary elections, deemed largely free and fair by
election observers, held in March 1992, the ruling CPDM won 88 seats (out of 180) in
the National Assembly. The outcome was not a victory for the ruling party. By forming
a coalition with a minor party the Movement for the Defense of the Republic (MDR),
the CPDM gained a slim four-seat majority in the legislature (Takougang 2003: 422).
The major opposition party Social Democratic Front (SDF, created in May 1990)
boycotted the elections. Other major opposition parties the National Union for
Democracy and Progress (NUDP) and the Union des Populations due Cameroun (UPC)
won 68 and 18 seats respectively (see Table 5.6).
In the presidential elections held in October 1992, Biya was reelected with only
about 40% of the votes and the opposition SDF candidate John Fru Ndi refused to
recognize the results because of the unfairness of the voting and electoral fraud (USAID
1993). Violence followed and Fru Ndi was put under house arrest. When he was
released in January 1993, parties continued to debate the election results. Biya
announced a “Grand National Debate” about further steps towards the country’s
democratization which took place during spring and summer of 1993 and involved
163
major newspapers, state radio and TV. Despite broad anti-regime mobilization, the
opposition is believed to be weak, fragmented and easily coopted by the regime.
When the crisis began Biya was reluctant to ask for outside help (because he
mistakenly believed that the crisis would be short-lived and soon over). In fact, the
government initial reaction consisted of transferring the assets from the secret oil
accounts into the state budget. Gauthier and Zeufack estimate that in the first three years
after the crisis onset about US $900 million of the extra budgetary funds were included
into the budget.
Table 5.6. Parliamentary election results for Cameroon
(number of seats) Political party 1992 1997 2002 2007 2013
CPDM 88 116 149 153 148
SDF * 43 22 16 18
NUDP 68 13 1 6 5
UPC 18 1 3 / 3
MDR 6 1
/ 1
UDC / 5 5 4 4
MP / / / 1 /
MLJC / 1 / / /
MRC / / / / 1
Total 180 180 180 180 180
Notes: CPDM=Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement
NUDP=National Union for Democracy and Progress
UPC=Union des Populations du Cameroun
MDR=Movement for the Defense of the Republic
SDF=Social Democratic Front
UDC=Cameroon Democratic Union
MP=Progressive Movement
MLJC=Liberty Movement of the Cameroon Youth
MRC=Cameroon Renaissance Movement
*boycotted
Source: IPU Parline; Takougang 2003
164
But when it became clear that the crisis would last longer, Biya agreed to
structural adjustments programs with the Word Bank and the IMF. The IMF provided
aid but the financial aid was conditional upon Cameroon’s accepting the terms and
conditions of structural adjustment programs (SAPs) including measures to improve
governance. In reality, however, SAPs produced doubtful outcomes and benefited the
state elites only. Instead of cutting public expenditure, Biya’s government continued to
use externally borrowed money and oil assets to expand the public sector and subsidize
the para-statals. As a result, because revenues decreased and debt service increased
(Subramanian 1994), the government was unable to meet its financial commitments
under the terms of adjustment conditionality. Reforms were implemented only partially
and in some areas were not implemented at all. Instead, “Ahidjo’s ‘enrichissez-vous’
[enrich yourselves] message a quarter century ago has given way to the aphorism often
used for elites in now distressed regimes: ‘apres moi le deluge’” (Krieger 1994).
Despite economic downfall, public administration employment expanded by
about 10% in the period of 1983-1993 (World Bank 1995, ii). Van de Walle (1993)
notes that the costs of the economic hardship were carried over to the masses and the
state elites were less affected. In 1993-95, urban unemployment rate was extremely
high. Informal sector became even more important for people’s lives. “Although
Cameroon’s experience in 1985-93 was extremely painful for almost all its citizens, the
pain was not evenly shared…By and large, the poor suffered first, while better-off
groups suffered relatively late in the process. A small group may not have suffered at
all” (World Bank 1995, 11-12). That small group less affected is civil servants and
public enterprise employees and the military: “Civil servants… experienced no pay cuts
until 1993. For most of the period they experienced rising real incomes as prices of
foods, rents, and many services fell. Some groups did not experience a loss of nominal
income: employees of public enterprises and the military, for example, still receive
unadjusted salaries, and have benefited in terms of real incomes as prices have fallen”
(World Bank 1995, 13).
Takougang argues that external pressure for democratization in Cameroon was
“symbolic rather than real” (2003, 432). Others note the inconsistency of IFIs
conditionality (Konings 1996). France provided economic support during the “Ghost
Town” campaign when the regime was seriously threatened, and whereas the US and
165
the EU reacted to the 1992 presidential elections with criticism and ceasing aid, French
government expressed support and provided financial support. In January 1992, amidst
popular protests France supplied Biya with arms for preserving political order (Konings
1996: 263). The amount of French financial support to Cameroon during the 1990-92
period was FCFA181 billion. When Biya’s government had difficulties paying salaries
for civil servants, France was quick to lend a helping hand and in October 1993 agreed
to allocate a loan of FCFA15 billion to Cameroon (Konings 1996, 254). In 1994, France
provided financial aid to Biya’s government to meet IMF obligations. One oft-cited
explanation for why French supported the status quo is that French fear that victory by
an Anglophone candidate Fru Ndi will damage French economic interests in Cameroon
(Takougang 2003, 432) and might lead to instability. As one Western diplomat noted,
“Cameroonians are not yet ready to have a Bamilike president” (ICG 2010b, fn.117).
5.5. Biya’s post-crisis survivability As the tide of transitions to democracy was swayed by the wave of hardening of
regimes across the continent, Cameroon, too, was reverting to greater authoritarianism.
Country experts use various expressions to describe this process: “la démocratie
emballée / a democracy that lost its footing, une transition manquée / a failed transition,
la démocratie… piégée / booby-trapped democracy, une transition démocratique ratée /
a missed democratic transition, l’interminable transition / the never-ending transition,
and une transition qui n’a pas eu lieu/ a transition that did not take place” (Tande 2012).
When the economic situation improved, Biya reemerged as one of Africa’s
longest-serving presidents. In the dubious election boycotted by three major opposition
parties held in 1997, he won the fourth seven-year term with 93% of the vote and then
another election (fifth term) in 2004 with 75% of the vote, and again in 2011. In the
parliamentary election held in 1997, the CPDM received 116 seats in the parliament and
in 2002 it gained 149 seats. The results of the 2007 and 2013 elections confirmed the
domination of the ruling party (see Table 5.6).
All these electoral victories reflect the incumbency advantage that Biya has
enjoyed as president. Among the advantages, discretionary powers over oil revenues
have been key: “Because the regime maintains a monopoly over the nation’s purse
strings, it has been able to manipulate individuals, regions, ethnic groups, and even
some opposition parties in an effort to maintain control of Cameroon politics”
166
(Takougang 2003, 428). The regime continues to maintain a bloated administration
which today counts more than 60 government ministries with key positions in civil and
military positions held by representatives of Biya’s own Bulu-Beti ethnic group
(Freedom House 2007). OECD (2012, 44) notes: “Regime stability has been built on an
extensive patronage network channelled through the structures of the state and the
ruling party. It is fuelled by corruption, looting of public finances and state-owned
banks, access to rents in the natural resource sector, and the growth of public sector
employment. Under the thin veneer of national unity, there is a constant juggling of
competing interests between different ethnic groups and regions.”
Since 2002, the country stepped into the second period of high oil revenues after
the first boom of 1979-1985. Because of the depletion of maturing fields and without
new discoveries (OECD 2007), oil production declined but since the mid-1990s it
slowed and stabilized around 90,000 barrels per day in recent years. Even though oil
output in Cameroon is moderate compared to large producers like Nigeria, its weight in
the domestic economy is still substantial. Between 1990 and 2005, oil accounted for
about 8% of GDP and 30% of total exports, and about 25% of total government revenue
(Cossé 2006, 8). While the economy is more diversified than in other oil exporting
countries, macroeconomic stability is highly vulnerable to supply fluctuations (Cossé
2006, 17).
As of 2007, oil contributed a large part of foreign exchange and government
revenue: 55% of export revenues and 33% of government revenue (Gauthier and
Zeufack 2009). It is commonly known that Cameroon’s oil revenue has been mired in
secrecy with very little publicly available information until recently. Calculating the
difference between the government oil revenues and the official budgetary figures,
Gauthier and Zeufack (2009) observed a large gap: the reported government figure of
oil revenue US$9.1 billion (2006) and the estimated total oil revenues of the
government is around US$19.8 billion. “This implies that around US$10.7 billion or
54% of oil rent have not been disclosed or transferred to the budget and might have
been appropriated by officials. The funds were used the resources to cater to the regimes
political clients and “after 20 years of adjustments and reforms, the oil sector remains at
the center of rent extraction, regime maintenance and corruption” (Gauthier and
Zeufack 2009, 47).
167
Biya was reelected in 2004 and his term was supposed to be his last one. It
seems this put into force the lame duck syndrome – that is his rivals began maneuvering
in view of the potential power transfer. But Biya moved quickly to prevent this. In April
2008, he removed presidential term limits which allowed him to run again in 2011. This
decision was followed by riots in the streets and strikes (Economist 2008). All this
indicates the presence of tensions within the regime (ICG 2010b). There seems to be a
certain degree of elite continuity as well. Most of senior civil servants, ministers and
managers of public enterprises – all of whom owing their position and therefore
allegiance directly to the president – are chosen from the same pool of individuals over
the last 30 years that Biya has been in power (ICG 2010b, 2). “Through Biya’s
clientelist management (“If you support me, I will give you sinecures”) and the absence
of oversight and sanctions, the leaders constitute a “chop tribe”, which monopolizes the
country’s riches” (ICG 2010b, 2).
5.6. Conclusion As was shown above, oil wealth has been an impediment to democratization in seven
sub-Saharan African oil-producing states. Oil revenues reinforced personalist tendencies
that characterize most of these states. The in-depth study of Cameroon shows that the
Cameroonian leader used oil revenues to buy the loyalty of the state elites. Given the
extreme personalism of the Cameroonian regime and systemic corruption, a substantial
part of the oil windfalls could have been misappropriated by the government officials.
Oil revenues were heavily invested in unprofitable public enterprises to provide jobs for
supporters. When revenues declined in the mid-1980s, the government tapped into the
secret oil accounts to finance expenditures on the expanded public sector. During the
boom years, oil revenues provided Biya with the necessary resources to buy loyalty of
the elites, which in the Cameroonian case was compounded by ethnic-linguistic-
regional heterogeneity of the population. Oil revenues helped Biya appease restive elites
and to expand the patronage network to include representatives of his own region and
newly mobilized groups.
But an exogenous shock in 1985-86 hit the economy hard. Bad policy choices,
corruption and mismanagement of revenues during the boom years magnified the
economic crisis. Biya acted carefully to preserve positions and privileges of his support
patronage network concentrated in the state sector. As a result, government employees
168
were least affected. Ordinary people who suffered the most were dissatisfied and went
to protest. Yet, financial aid contributed by France and international financial
institutions (IFIs) helped Biya’s government withstand the critical 1991-92 years.
Inconsistency in democracy promotion by western governments, aid conditionality by
IFIs and France’s economic and political support for the regime reduced the
effectiveness of Western leverage, as Levitsky and Way (2010) rightly pointed out.
When the economy returned to normal and government revenues increased in the late
1990s and especially since 2002 (due to high oil prices), the window of opportunity for
democratic change had been already missed and hegemonic authoritarianism set in as a
new equilibrium situation.
169
Chapter 6. Oil, Personalism and Regime Dynamics in Venezuela
6.1. Introduction On March 5, 2013 Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez died after ruling the country for
14 years. He came to power amidst the deep crisis of the 1959-98 democracy. His
presidency coincided with an unprecedented oil boom that generated a whopping USD
$1 trillion in total revenue (Corrales 2012). Bolstered by oil windfalls, Chávez launched
a project of radical transformation aimed at replacing the pre-existing party-based
democracy with the new, Bolivarian republic. What emerged in consequence was a
political system characterized by extreme presidentialism, neopopulism, and remarkable
personalism. While Chávez’s personalism was sometimes linked to his and his
associates’ plans to overhaul the previous regime and justified as necessary for carrying
out the revolutionary project of “Socialism of the 21st century”, there was nothing
inevitable about it. In this chapter, I show that the extreme personalism of the Chávez
regime and its maintenance can, at least partly, be linked to the dynamics in the
structure of Venezuela’s oil revenues. There are two ways in which oil contributed to
the personalism of the chavismo project. The first way through which oil made
personalism possible was the mechanism of democratic backsliding, whereby due to the
mismanagement of oil revenue by the Punto Fijo administrations the Venezuelan model
of democracy was discredited and perceived to be highly corrupt and unrepresentative.
This generated a set of conditions that enabled the emergence and eventual victory of a
populist leader. The second mechanism is related to the ways in which oil revenues
allowed Chávez to assault democratic institutional checks and to centralize authority in
his own hands. Next sections describe several strategies, from constitutional changes to
clientelist social spending that Chávez and his elites used to achieve their goals.
6.2. Historical background Any discussion of the recent history would be incomplete without appreciation of
history and its legacies. What follows is a brief description of Venezuelan political
history prior to the spectacular rise of Chávez in 1999.
6.2.1. Before the Punto Fijo pact Venezuela was an underdeveloped and backward country before the oil discoveries by
Shell were made in 1922. It has one of the world’s oldest oil industries dating back to
170
the 1920s when the country was under the rule of Juan Vicente Gómez. Revenues from
oil concenssions provided Gómez with patronage resources necessary to centralize state
authority and maintain political dominance. At the same time, he took advantage of oil
windfalls to pocket for himself, his family members and cronies (Alexander 1965). His
death in 1935 put an end to 27 years of dictatorship, but that was not the end of
authoritarianism. Two generals, Eleazar López Contreras and Isaías Medina Angarita,
who succeeded Gómez used the oil revenues to satisfy the demands of expanding urban
classes vying for greater social participation (Coronil 1997). The coup d’état by a group
of young army officers in 1945 ousted the regime of General Angarita and propelled
Acción Democrática (Democratic Action, AD) to power. In 1947, the AD leader
Rómulo Gallegos was elected president with 75% of the vote, but survived in office for
only 9 months. This first short democratic interlude in Venezuelan modern history is
known as the “trienio adeco” (adecos are members of the AD). One of the key changes
introduced by the AD government was the revision of rent derivation formula in oil
contracts with western companies. A new 50-50 principle of equal sharing of profits
between the host government and the oil companies was introduced. The trienio
government was overthrown by another military coup. The dictatorship of Marcos Pérez
Jiménez, consolidated by a palace coup in 1952, was installed. Pérez Jiménez embarked
on a massive, and largely wasteful, spending spree following the declaration of the
policy of “sowing the oil” (“sembrar el petroleo”). Although the policy of “sowing the
oil” aimed to diversify the economy, in reality the oil earnings were spent on lavish
infrastructure construction projects, rather than the development of non-oil industries,
agricultural growth, or human capacity development. During Pérez Jiménez’s rule, the
Venezuelan state received $7 billion in revenue from the export of petroleum (Gall
2006). A remarkable feature of Pérez Jiménez’s rule was his uncompromising style of
leadership which, according to Coronil (1997), implied an attempt “to rule alone”.
In 1958, Pérez Jiménez was toppled in another military coup and the leaders of
three pro-democratic parties – the social democratic AD, the Christian democratic
COPEI (the Partido Social Cristiano de Venezuela), and the Left centrist URD - their
leaders being Romulo Betancourt, Rafael Caldera and Jóvito Villalba, respectively,
negotiated a peaceful transition to democracy which would last for the next 30 years.
Karl (1997) argues that oil played a positive role in Venezuela’s party elite-led
171
democratization by allowing the major parties to peacefully come to an agreement with
regard to the sharing of power and then to respect their commitment to power sharing.
The first president Rómulo Betancourt known as the “Father of Venezuelan
Democracy” was elected president in 1958 and served until 1963 when he stepped down
in the first-ever civilian transfer of power. The “Punto Fijo system” was consensual,
allowing for participation of organized interests in the policymaking through corporatist
mechanisms and was generally designed to foster power sharing and cooperation,
although because of its alignment with the U.S. the initial pact excluded the communists
(who started a guerrilla movement).
The key institutional pillars of the pact included the following features (Monaldi
et al. 2006): 1) constitutionally weak presidency, 2) limits on immediate presidential
reelection, 3) absence of term limits on legislators which enabled party members to
develop long-term careers in Congress, and 4) proportional representation (PR) electoral
system for legislative elections. These elements along with the functioning of
centralized and disciplined parties helped to consolidate the party system during the
1960s and 1970s. The Punto Fijo system also restricted electoral contestation for
governors and mayors because of the fear that in the context of the democratic transition
opening this arena would lead to fragmentation and polarization. On the negative side,
this did not take into account the longer-term effect of restricting federalism which was
fully enacted only in the 1990s.
6.2.2. Punto Fijo and the crisis of democracy The “Punto Fijo system” was a limited, qualified polyarchy at the center of which stood
the two “deeply entrenched” political parties that operated in the context of electoral
contestation and broad public participation. These two parties from the times of
“trienio” were committed to the democratic principle of winning office through free and
fair contestation. In reality, both were clientelistic parties consisting of “multi-class
patronage networks” or patronage machines (McCoy and Myers 2004, 3). Generally
speaking, the AD-COPEI system was functioning as a “cartel-like arrangement”
(Monaldi et al. 2006, 9) and was also termed ‘partyarchy’ (Coppedge 1994) to highlight
the exaggerated weight of the two dominant parties relative to other parties and relative
to weak presidential powers. The two main parties essentially run the democratic system
as a pyramidal patronage network. The AD Party had the largest patronage network.
172
Membership in the party had concrete benefits for its members (see e.g. Caracas
Chronicles 2003). The second largest party COPEI and the left-wing MAS run smaller
patronage networks. Government expenditures that went from top to bottom through
bureaucratic channels with superimposed patronage network were actually siphoned off
by successive layers of patrons before they reached the ultimate destination for which
they were allocated. So, the patronage system functioned as the structure linking clients
to their patrons, but was also prone to corruption that greased the wheels of patron-
client transactions. As Caracas Chronicles (2003, n.p.) notes: “while the [Punto Fijo]
system was inefficient, bloated, anti-democratic, and everything else, the system was
not totally useless - and in its amoral way, the corruption served as a rough-and-ready
way to spread the oil money around, to make sure it reached many hands, not just a
few”.
Because oil played a preeminent role in sustaining the Venezuelan
‘partidocracy’, it was also called a “subsidized democracy” (cited in Sylvia and
Danopolous 2003). In principle, similar to the dictatorship of Pérez Jiménez, the
policies adopted by the popularly elected administrations during the 1960-1970 resulted
in the wasteful spending of oil resources. Monaldi et al. (2006) argue that the factor of
oil revenues as such cannot explain the choice of the institutional arrangement
(democratic or authoritarian) since oil revenue distribution was used by the Punto Fijo
presidents rather as “a utilitarian mechanism to obtain support for the democratic
system” (Monaldi et al. 2006, 13). This also helps explain why the system collapsed
following the decline in oil revenue in the 1980s. The first three presidents used the oil
revenue responsibly. They invested in education, healthcare and infrastructure which
was reflected positively in the socio-economic outcomes.
Prudent fiscal policies were replaced by the spending spree with the
administration of Carlos Andrés Pérez (1974-1979) presiding over an unprecedented oil
boom. His administration invested heavily in existing state enterprises as well as
opening up new ones. A large portion of the spending was covered through borrowing
because of the government’s belief that the oil revenue will be enough to pay the
foreign debt later. The administration of Luis Herrera Campins (1979-84) that came to
replace Andrés Pérez had to adjust the fiscal policy because of the rising fiscal deficit,
but another short-lived surge in oil revenues forced the government to revise its earlier
173
adjustment plans and again increase public spending. When the oil prices finally
dropped in 1983, the whole scheme of revenue distribution, expansionary fiscal policies
and debt accumulation crashed leading to a long and deep recession. The new
administration of Jaime Lusinchi (1984-88) erroneously believed that negative shocks
were temporary and acted to postpone structural economic reforms (Monaldi et al.
2006). So by the time Andrés Pérez assumed presidency for the second time in 1989,
the economy was in a dire state. To correct the imbalances in economic performance
Andrés Pérez’s team adopted a set of structural reforms. However, poor economic
performance already hollowed out the voters’ confidence in the ruling parties. Many
voters started to regard the system as rent-seeking and corrupt and therefore not
representing the interests of the wider society. The dominance of the two parties made
the system very rigid, bureaucratic appointments were based on party loyalty, governors
were appointed centrally by the president, and state sector positions were used as tools
to supply patronage to party followers. A set of institutional reforms including direct
elections of governors and other measures aimed at promoting federalism,
decentralization and opening of the party systems were proposed by a special
commission under the Lusinchi administration but were rejected by the AD party
leadership as too radical. The real motivation for refusal was linked to the AD fear to
lose control over the patronage network consisting of expanded regional and local
bureaucracies and basically the party thought the reforms would undermine the party’s
power. Some of these reforms were adopted later after the riots in Caracas in 1989.
Public expenditures were used by the Venezuelan government to construct
highways, offices, hotels and other items requiring high-cost physical capital
investments (Karl 1997; Gall 2006). The apex of wasteful spending was the first
administration of President Andrés Pérez (1974-79). His government oversaw the
stream of revenue that exceeded the total revenue Venezuelan governments had since
1920s combined together. The 1970 oil boom overburden the state with the new tasks
that the state bureaucratic apparatus was not ready to perform. Because of government
inefficiency fiscal expansion propelled corruption and waste. This in turn undermined
the legitimacy of the ‘pacted democracy’ and forestalled the collapse of the party
system two decades later (Karl 1997). Like Pérez Jiménez before him and Chávez three
decades later, Andrés Pérez I who announced his program Gran Venezuela (1974),
174
concentrated all decisionmaking powers in his own hands and essentially ruled by
decree during his first year in office (Gall 2006). He expanded the public sector
employment by creating new public enterprises while discouraging any debate about the
righteousness of the chosen developmental course. By the end of his administration, the
opposition was asking: “Where has the money gone?” When the world oil prices
plummeted in the early 1980s, the Venezuelan oil revenue fell by 60%. The government
responded by borrowing abroad. As a result, foreign debt began to accumulate,
increasing fourfold to reach $33 billion by the late 1980s (Gall 2006). In another
surprising twist of events, the AD party candidate Andrés Pérez (1989-1993) who was
responsible for state interventionist policies and resultant corruption in the 1970s
reemerged in the late 1980s with the new program of neoliberal reforms El Gran Viraje
(The Great Turnabout). The package of reforms including the highly unpopular measure
to double fuel prices came with the IMF negotiated policies called the “paquetazo”. The
austerity measures hit the general populace hard and protest and riots in Caracas streets
followed in 1989 in which 400 people were killed in the events known as the Caracazo.
In 1992, military officers attempted two unsuccessful coups, one of them organized by
Lt Colonel Hugo Chávez. President Andrés Pérez was also trying to reform his own
party AD which by the time had become a large patronage machine. His neoliberal
reforms were not popular within the party either as party leadership saw that restricting
resources under state control would hurt their access to patronage and privileges
(Weyland 2003). When riots hit Andrés Pérez popularity, the party elite no longer
deemed necessary to support him, and he was impeached on corruption charges. He was
succeeded by the populist politician Caldera who by that time left the COPEI to run as
an independent trying to distance himself from the already unpopular party oligarchies.
Caldera did not condemn the Chávez coup in 1992 since the political parties, which he
tried to disassociate himself from, were widely seen as unrepresentative and corrupt.
This all added discontent to the already unpopular AD-COPEI rule and by the
election in 1998 the edifice of the entire “Punto Fijo” system collapsed. The fall of the
entrenched party-based system was also the result of the conflict between the two major
party machines and anti-system parties. As the AD and COPEI continued to fragment in
the 1990s, the pro-Chávez MVR in coalition with smaller leftwing and more
personalistic parties gained momentum. As a result, a system in which strong parties
175
dominated for decades was replaced with the one in which “parties have become weaker
and thinner and the most important actor is the president” (Alvarez 2006, 19).
Generally, Venezuela’s economic growth performance can be divided into 3
periods (Monaldi et al. 2006):
1) between 1958 and 1978: high growth, good economic performance, declining
poverty;
2) from 1978 to 2004: poor growth, declining incomes, increasing poverty;
3) from 2004: new economic growth, improving living standards, decline in poverty.
6.3. Chávez: Oil and regime consolidation After being elected president Chávez put the criticism of the previous liberal democracy
at the forefront of his ideology and offered an alternative concept of “democratic,
participatory and protagonist model of democracy” that the new Bolivarian republic will
strive to implement. In contrast to the model of representative democracy of Punto Fijo,
the Chávez’s model was built on ideas of participatory democracy, especially direct
citizen participation in public affairs (Canache 2007). However, whether the actual
Bolivarian republic corresponds to the ideals of participatory democracy remains a
subject of debate because the democratic credentials of Chávez’s regime are now being
questioned. If the old system of partyarchy was criticized as being too bureaucratized
and rigid, the Chávez’s regime was deliberately under-institutionalized and highly
personalistic (Alvarez 2006, 21).
6.3.1. Oil dependence Venezuela boasts the world’s largest reserves of oil, and oil has traditionally been a
significant, if not defining, feature of the Venezuelan political economy. Until 1970s,
Venezuela was the world’s largest exporter of oil. Today it has 78 billion in proven
crude reserves with billions more extra heavy crude in the Orinoco belt. According to
more recent estimates, Venezuela surpassed Saudi Arabia in proven oil reserves with an
estimated 296.5 billion barrels as of end of 2011 (Rowling 2012).
This year (2014) Venezuela marks the 100 years anniversary since the discovery
of oil in 1914 in Mene Grande near the Lake Maracaibo (Tinker-Salas 2013). “Control
of the Venezuelan government implies control of the largest natural gas reserves in
Latin America and the largest deposit of oil in the world” (Tinker-Salas 2013). Not only
176
is Venezuela a prototypical oil state, it is also a case of lesson drawing for other oil
exporters suffering from the oil curse. As Monaldi rightly observed, “Venezuela is the
textbook case of the worst economic policies if you want to avoid the resource curse”
(quoted in Green 2013).
Venezuela has been not just abundant in oil resources but it has been dependent
on it. Oil provides 80% of government total export revenue, about half of federal
government revenue and 1/3 of the country’s GDP (Bruce 2008; Alvarez and Hanson,
2009). The US is Venezuela’s key oil trading partner. Venezuela is the fourth largest
supplier of oil to the U.S. Chávez started steps to nationalize parts of the oil industry
controlled by foreign firms in 2006. This led to the increase of the state’s share in those
oil projects from 40% to 60%.
Figure 6.1. Venezuela: Petroleum income per capita in US dollars
Source: Ross 2013.
Despite the government’s efforts to diversify the economy, oil still dominates
the Venezuelan economy. Venezuela’s national oil company, the PDVSA, has current
production levels at between 2.55 to 3.2 million barrels per day (Alvarez and Hanson
2009). Figure 6.1 shows the dynamics in the Venezuelan oil wealth.
Venezuela’s oil history can be divided into four periods (Monaldi et al. 2006):
0
1000
2000
3000
4000
5000
6000
7000
1946 1951 1956 1961 1966 1971 1976 1981 1986 1991 1996 2001 2006
Petroleum Income Per Capita (Ross)
177
1) 1958-1973: decline in the world oil prices, higher taxes on oil, more production,
gradual increase in oil fiscal revenues;
2) 1973-82: oil boom, windfall revenue, price volatility, nationalization of oil between
1974-76;
3) 1983-2002: low oil prices, volatile revenue;
4) 2003/4 to present: oil boom, windfall revenues.
Chávez’s Venezuela is different from other oil states in at least three aspects: first, it has
been running a large deficit. Second, it does not have a stabilization fund. Third, it
provides huge fuel subsidies by charging very low fuel prices; basically gasoline in
Venezuela is free (Green 2013).
6.4. Strategies of personalization Chávez used a number of strategies to accumulate power: constitutional changes,
delegative structures and hyperpresidentialism, control of the state oil company,
reversal of territorial decentralization of power and fiscal federalism, clientelistic
distribution of social welfare programs, institutional packing, “crowding out the
opposition”, populist rhetoric and policies, politicization of the army, corruption, and
deliberate avoidance of party institutionalization. All of these separately and
collectively fueled the personalistic tendencies in Venezuela. Below I describe each in
more detail.
6.4.1. Constitutional changes Soon after being elected president, Chávez initiated a series of changes in the
constitution that were passed in a Constituent Assembly in 1999 replacing the old 1961
constitution. In an election into the Assembly, which was approved by 90% of the
voters, Chávez supporters won 96% of the seats and passed a new constitution. He
disbanded Congress and replaced it with a new unicameral legislature. The Assembly
also appointed new Supreme Tribunal, Comptroller General, Attorney General, and
Ombudsman. All of these structures were filled with pro-Chávez supported picked up
by Chávez himself. Old opposition parties were under or unrepresented, which marked
a departure from the spirit of consensus seeking and pact making that characterized the
Punto Fijo era.
178
These changes expanded presidential powers vis-a-vis the legislature and
judiciary. The new constitution weakened legislature powers by abolishing the upper
house and transforming the bicameral parliament into a unicameral assembly by
merging Senate and the House of Representative, and thus reducing the number of
legislative veto points and strengthened president’s powers by allowing the possibility
of immediate reelection, which was prohibited in the past (Weyland 2003, 828). The
president’s term was extended from five to six years. Chávez was re-elected as
president according to the new Bolivarian Constitution in 2000. In addition, Chávez was
granted significant decree powers subject to approval of enabling law by the legislature.
Another major change granted the president the exclusive right to decide on military
promotions without legislative approval. The new constitution was also “the most
heavily presidentialist constitution in Latin America” (Corrales and Penfold 2007).
While these changes were made before the oil boom and reflected Chávez’s
insecurity in office, steps toward extreme personalization, such as the removal of term
restrictions, were taken during the oil boom. I regard the desire to remove presidential
term limits, extend term duration and stay in office beyond constitutionally mandated
terms as the most accurate indicator of personalism or its highest stage. Similar attempts
were made in Nigeria under Obasanjo. All these constitutional changes reflect the
president’s strong desire to concentrate power. Oil fueled this motivation by creating the
incentives for wealth and power maximization and provided resource advantages to the
incumbent.
Later Chávez also established control of the courts and the electoral commission
as well as all major media channels. Chávez used a number of tricks to stifle opposition
including the closing down of independent TV channels, intimidation of opponents and
dissenting judges, utilization of state administrative resource for electoral campaigns.
Another strategy allowed by Chávez’s control of courts and other major institutions was
discriminatory legalism following the maxim: “For my friends, everything; for my
enemies, the law!” (Weyland 2013).
6.4.2. Delegative tendencies Another important indicator of personalization is the elimination of horizontal checks,
indicating the increase in delegative tendencies (O’Donnell 1994). The idea to do away
with institutional checks has its origins in the chavista circles before Chávez came to
179
power. While in prison after the aborted coup in 1992 Chávez wrote that in reality “no
separation of powers exists in Venezuela, since political parties, deliberately violating
their function as intermediaries between society and the state, conspire to usurp popular
sovereignty and allow the [national] executive to assume all state power” while also
claiming that the legislature is “subservient to the executive while appointing all
members of the judiciary” (cited in Ellner 2011, 425). Although the intellectual
inspiration for centralized control originated in the revisionist Marxist ideological
debate of the 1980-1990s, the implementation became possible only in an environment
of deep public distrust of Punto Fijo-era politicians and after the acquisition of power
and subsequent reforms supported by the massive stream of oil revenues since around
2003. Ellner is right observing that “Chávez’s notion of state power and centralized
control presaged the concentration of power in the executive branch of government that
has characterized his rule” (2011, 426). However, it seems implausible that he would he
be able to realize his centralization of power project had there not been a fertile
environment for the emergence and support for such a change and, most importantly,
without resources afforded by oil.
Around 2009, some leftwing intellectuals, especially Juan Carlos Monedero,
started to notice and warn Chávez of what they saw as the tendency to concentrate too
much power in his hands. They called it “hyper-leadership”. Chávez refuted such claims
saying: “What does ‘hyper’ mean? It means something that is oversized (...) As a result,
I should limit my leadership. Well, that’s what the enemy wants. Do not you think so?”
(El Universal 2009).
A powerful executive is a feature of the growing tendency among Latin
American states to develop what O’Donnell (1994) described as delegative democracy,
characterized by “hyperpresidentialist” leadership, extensive use of decree powers and
reliance on vertical electoralist mechanisms sometimes at the expense of horizontal
checks.26 Chávez’s Venezuela certainly fits this description.
6.4.3. Subordination of PDVSA to presidency and changes in oil governance It seems control of wealth was indispensable for political power concentration achieved
by Chávez. Oil provided the major source of state revenue during his tenure. As the
popular saying goes, “who controls PDVSA controls Venezuela”. PDVSA (Petroleos de 26 For an alternative perspective, see Ellner (2001).
180
Venezuela S.A.) is the state-owned petroleum company in charge of oil production and
exportation. It is one of the worlds largest oil companies along with Saudi Aramco and
ExxonMobil. It expanded its refinery capacities after buying a US-based petroleum
company CITGO.
In an explanation for the Venezuelan paradox of plenty, Corrales and Penfold
(2011) highlight the erosion of institutional checks and balances capitalizing on the
changes in and around the PDVSA, the previously autonomous corporate entity. They
argue that Chávez’s entrenchment would not have been possible without the steps taken
by Chávez to weaken the institutional checks and balances prior to the oil boom.
One of the arguments in support of the thesis that oil did not hurt democratic
transition in Venezuela is that it has the experience of democratic government (the
trienio) and Venezuela nationalized oil in 1976, almost two decades after the first
democratic elections. While nationalism was a feature in 1970s, following the troubles
after the oil price crash in 1986 and beginning in 1989 Venezuelan leaders took the
course towards liberalization of the oil industry through the Oil Opening policy or
Apertura Petrolera (Mommer 1998). The objective was to open the industry to foreign
investors including privatization of parts of the PDVSA. Amidst the turmoil of the
1980s and 1990s, PDVSA was “the only profitable, stable and dynamic institution”. But
it also was a “state within the state” due to the amount of financial resources it had
under control. Chávez reversed the Oil Opening policy, passed a new hydrocarbon law,
confirmed constitutionally that PDVSA belongs to the state, and expropriated or re-
nationalized some of the previously privatized companies under the auspices of
PDVSA. In fact, since the mid-2000s, he nationalized about 100 major and 900 minor
firms (Corrales 2012). These actions met resistance from the PDVSA’s top executive
management, the technocratic elite of the company, which led to a major strike in 2002.
The PDVSA top managers supported the 2002 coup, which temporarily ousted Chávez
from office in April 2002. They also supported the opposition protest and lockout
during the same year. Chávez stood the challenge and responded by sacking 18,000
managers and technical personnel of PDVSA from the company.
After subordination of the state oil company to Chávez has been achieved, the
company was turned into a “Bolivarian state enterprise” (Bruce 2008), “a bloated, all-
purpose development agency with which to dispense largesse” (Economist 2012). And
181
the new president of PDVSA Rafael Ramírez was quoted as saying that Chávez was
planning to use the company to “transform Venezuela from an oil sultanate to a
productive society within a socialist framework” (cited in Alvarez and Hanson 2009).
6.4.4. Rolling back on decentralization reforms and recentralization Another area affected by Chávez’s desire of unlimited power was regional and local
government. In this area, Chávez favored the centralization of authority,
noninstitutionalized intermediation directly linking locales to the president. This was
made easy by the rentier nature of Venezuelan state, i.e. fiscal autonomy of the state
relieved the need to devolve authority to regional governments for fiscal purposes.
Many decentralization reforms were reversed and the president now could use greater
fiscal dependence of regional government on the center to punish political opponents.
In the 1990s, many Latin American governments implemented reforms to
promote political, administrative and fiscal decentralization. Venezuela also introduced
a number of reforms to devolve authority. After his election, Chávez reversed this and
introduced a new concept of territorial administration stressing the role of local
communities and direct links between local government and the presidential office in
Caracas. The effect of this was that instead of decentralization that the Chávez’s policy
aimed to achieve the new governance model recentralized authority. Local communities
that sprang all across the country were used to weaken the political opposition that was
in control in some regions. In the past, gubernatorial victories allowed opposition
parties COPEI and AD to survive after the demise of the partyarchy system. For
example, the leader and major opponent of Chávez in the last decade Henrique Capriles
built his political career and opposition stronghold in the state of Miranda. Opposition
parties sometimes won in economically strategic states like in the major oil-producing
state Zulia. Chávez was calculating rationally that leaving subnational governments on
their own could be too risky. Revenues previously allocated to subnational governments
were taken away or reallocated to reward regime supporters (Eaton 2013). Similar
strategies of fiscal and administrative centralization can be observed in other major oil-
producing states with the federalist structure such as Nigeria and Russia.
While it can be said that some of Chávez’s reforms in the local government area
enhanced citizen participation in local affairs, the national policymaking has remained
extremely concentrated in Chávez hands and top-down. Because of the weakness or
182
near absence of intermediary institutions, deliberately disfavored by Chávez, people
were deprived of the opportunity to influence national decision-making. The model of
Chávez rule was inspired by the ideology of radical democracy and Jean-Jacque
Rousseau in its emphasis placed on direct popular participation and majority rule
(Ellner 2011). Both radical democratic and social democratic elements of the Chávez
presidency were inimical to institution-building and institutional mechanisms of interest
intermediation.
6.4.5. Social programs and clientelism Perhaps one area in which the effect of oil on personalism can be clearly observed was
social policy. Chávez spent billions of oil money on social programs, yet much of the
funds were allocated on the partisan loyalty basis rather than some universalistic
principles. The arbitrariness in social spending often meant that resources were used as
patronage to reward the regime cronies, to cultivate the sense of loyalty to the president
such as when the president took credit for something he has not done much to generate
(i.e. oil rents). Social benefits presented as gifts of president stimulated populist beliefs
and paternalistic attitudes.
The area of social welfare spending was largely left untouched in the first years
of Chávez’s rule. Policies of previous administrations were kept. Before the strike and
the April coup in 2002 (removing Chávez from office for 36 hours), Chávez was not
concerned with social programs so much and in fact cut some of the social programs
from previous administrations. Weyland argues that Chávez did not have a clear
political program in the initial years after coming to power. When the new constitution
was passed in 1999, the Venezuelan economy was still in deep crisis carried over from
the mismanagement of oil and policy failures of the Punto Fijo policymakers. And as
Chávez himself admitted, “We had no money at all; the little there was they [the
oligarchy and former political establishment] took with them when they left... The oil
price was very low due to a foolish policy that ran totally against Venezuelan interests...
There was no money to pay the teachers and government employees” (Guevara 2005,
24).
In his early years around 1999, Chávez pursued a somewhat conservative fiscal
policy. The only program aimed at helping the poor sectors that employed more than
183
60,000 soldiers from the regular army forces was Plan Bolivar 2000 started in February
1999 (figure from Guevara, 2005).
This changed dramatically after the April coup and a two-month strike in 2002-
2003. These two events triggered radical steps from the government and prompted it to
implement the socialist welfare model (Ellner 2011). So the launch of social programs
was a reaction to the political events of 2002, i.e. the major strike and the coup d’état.
These two events indicated the strengthening of political opposition forces to Chávez’s
rule. Just months after the opposition lockout, in the late 2003 as the oil prices surged,
Chávez launched social programmes or missions (“misiones” in Spanish) in the areas of
healthcare targeting the underprivileged in the barrios (the Barrio Adentro Mission),
education (Robinson, Ribas, Sucre Missions) and food distribution (MERCAL)
missions involving Cuban specialists that were being planned already in 2001. Massive
expenditures followed the surge in oil prices in the early 2000s, despite the IMF advice
to restrain fiscal expansion. Funds for these numerous “misiones” were provided
through “opaque and non-budgetary mechanisms” of transferring billions of oil revenue
from the state oil company to special funds under the president’s control (Penfold-
Becerra 2006, 5). The money spent through the misiones programs partly went to
political purposes such as “buying votes” and partly distributed to the poor sections of
the population. As such, social spending helped Chávez strengthen electoral and
political support from these sections of the population that were previously politically
excluded (Pendfold-Becerra 2006).
Chávez’s social missions were very popular and allowed him to garner support
of poor and underprivileged constituencies (Perez 2013). While it is without doubt that
Chávez gained most support from poor voters in 1998 and the wealthiest voters always
voted against him, it seems in subsequent elections most support for Chávez came from
middle classes (Lupu 2010). A more plausible explanation is that support for Chávez is
multi-class based, as argued by Weyland, and which is commonly found in populist
governments. This was helped by Chávez’s anti-oligarchic rhetoric and pro-poor
redistribution and clientelism after the 2002 coup aimed to mobilize support of the
underprivileged classes. But as some of Chávez social and economic policies benefitted
middle classes, Lupu concludes that “a broad coalition of the poor, the middle classes,
184
and even some wealthy sectors, have supported Chávez at the ballot box” (Lupu 2010,
27).
However, social policy seems to be targeting excluded groups such as
underprivileged parts of the population (Ellner 2011). As Hawkins (2010) rightly
pointed out, many of these missions would have been impossible without the
skyrocketing rise in oil revenues in the period after 2003 and especially from 2004
onward. Most of these social programs are financed by contributions from PDVSA,
which though experienced dwindling investment and deteriorating infrastructure, have
sufficient funds to provide the needed resources.
Chávez victories are difficult to imagine without his use of public spending
funneled through the huge patronage machine that buys political loyalty of the voters.
This spending increases especially during election campaigns, is what can be called a
“spending orgy” (Shifter 2012). Anti-poverty programs brought the fruits, the poverty
levels dropped significantly and literacy improved.
Chávez spent an estimated $300 billion on “social development”, i.e. education
and healthcare, during his presidency (James 2012). This spending spree was funded by
the revenue stream of more than $981 billion that PDVSA earned between 1999 and
2011. Poverty dropped from 50% in 1999 to about 32% in 2011 (James 2012), a
significant reduction, but still less than could have been achieved given how much had
been spent.
The role of funds taken from PDVSA by the executive for spending is hard to
overestimate. Contributions tripled from $16.5 billion in 2004 to 58.6 billion in 2011.
Not all of it spent on social policies, but billions spent to buy weaponry from Russia.
University enrollment jumped up, a new tuition-free Bolivarian University was
established, but the biggest part of expenditure went to pay and keep an expanding
public sector, the bureaucratic apparatus. The public sector almost doubled, the number
of public employees increased from 1.3 million to 2.4 million during Chávez’s tenure.
Since 2005, public sector employment expanded from 15 to 19 percent of the labor
force (Corrales 2012). PDVSA which had 40 thousand workers when Chávez became
president now has 120 thousand employees (Monaldi 2014).
Chávez’s government has also been criticized for increasing criminal murder
rates, grows of slums, falling quality of public infrastructure. Because of “government
185
inefficiency, ineffectiveness, incompetence” (quoted in James 2012). The Venezuelan
economy remains highly oil reliant and unsustainable. If oil prices fall, “there is no
productive engine to feed us” but while they are high fantasies can be paid for” (James
2012).
6.4.6. Elite recruitment, institutional packing As Chávez was expanding the public sector using the oil revenues, the key criterion for
being included or excluded was clientelism. It was common for Chávez to replace state
officials and public employees with those loyal to his Bolivarian project. For many
positions, he appointed loyalist confidants often from the military, which he trusted
more, rather than through meritocratic selection. As political loyalty has become the key
criterion for inclusion, the quality of state management deteriorated and the state
entered “an advanced stage of decomposition” (Weyland 2001, 81).
6.4.7. Electoral competition Or in other words, “crowding out the opposition” (Corrales and Penfold, 2007). Under
Chávez, elections turned into personality-based contests used highly populist strategies
in their campaigning. Oil supported many of Chávez’s populist and clientelistic
redistribution policies making the electotral arena highly unfavorable to opposition
parties.
With the rise of Chávez, the elections did not become a plebiscite but were
meaningful events. Yet, what was now different from contests was that oppositionists
had to compete in the environment that lacked a level playing field. The electoral arena
has favored the ruling party candidates through institutional manipulations, media
control, and large resource disparities. In other words, to use Levitsky and Way (2010),
elections were free but not fair.
Several stages in the “election game” can be identified, in late 1990s until 2003
the initial years after Chávez elections when traditional opposition parties were divided
and electorally weak. But the opposition tried to mobilize discontent by organizing a
major strike in 2001. The strike was followed by a coup attempt in 2002. As the coup
was associated with the opposition plot, this had the effect of weakening opposition.
But opposition still managed to collect enough votes for a recall referendum in August
2004 which Chávez won: 59% against removing Chávez, 41% in favor.
186
The second period covers the time after the coup when the opposition was weak
and impotent. In 2005, Chávez’s control of all major government institutions was so
“complete” that opposition parties decided to boycott the legislative elections held that
year (Corrales and Penfold 2007). Around the same time, Chávez had the parliament
pass a ruling on “enabling powers” allowing him to rule by decree for 18 months from
February 2007. This demonstrates how Chávez began to abuse the concentration of
power in his hands. The ongoing oil boom and the weakening of representative
institutions contributed to this personalization of power. In Venezuela, what began as a
push to cleanse the government of entrenched oligarchies in the late 1990s gradually
degenerated into an increasingly authoritarian system in which corruption proliferated.
The fact that political deterioration followed the start of an oil boom is not a mere
coincidence. The more the Chávez regime benefited from oil, the more it exploited the
public resources to marginalize the opposition and weaken intermediaries in the civil
society. Chávez cracked down on all major organized interest groups including trade
unions, business associations, dividing them and often staffing with loyalists (Weyland
2001).
Following the autocratization of the Chávez’s rule around mid-2000s, political
opposition was completely disempowered. By early 2006,
“the opposition had virtually capitulated. Every one of its strategies had failed. Massive mobilizations, labor strikes, the recall, appeals to the international community, and electoral participation had produced nothing but waning power and fewer concessions from the government. The opposition ran out of options and gas at least in part because in Venezuela, as in any oil-exporting country in which the state dominates the petrochemical sector, the government controls the fuel both literally and figuratively, and can give it to friends while keeping it away from foes” (Corrales and Penfold 2007, 103).
After 2004, clientelism and the emasculated institutions reinforced each other.
Weakening of checks expanded the government’s scope of discretion over spending
allocations allowing for high patronage spending and expansion of clientelism. Growing
clientelism in turn enabled to buy political support reducing the need in institutions.
Chávez spent the petro-dollars through highly non-transparent channels such as special
funds under the executive discretion and without legislative oversight. According to
187
some estimates, US $15 billion from the recent oil boom is believed to have been stored
in these secretive funds. The funds, such as the National Development Fund (FONDEN)
under executive control was set up in 2005 and accumulated funds from both
international reserves and transfers from PDVSA. All these transactions are off-budget.
Most expenditures from these funds followed the clientelistic logic to reward
supporters. This left the opposition without access to state resources and skewed the
level playing field (Corrales 2011). Chávez’s peak of popularity came after his
reelection in 2006, when he won 63% against the opposition candidate Manuel Rosales
who got 37%. His most anti-democratic measures were taken after this reelection. He
nationalized many sectors of the economy, clamped down on a popular private
television channel and emasculated elected offices that were controlled by opposition
forces.
The third period is when opposition gains momentum between 2007-2010. This
also coincided with the fall in oil prices in 2008, but only for a short period. The
opposition’s recovery was happening in an increasingly authoritarian and hostile
political environment, in which, for instance in May 2007, a major opposition television
station RCTV was closed down. During the same year, the Chavistas in parliament
ratified a constitutional reform package that would further consolidate presidential
powers, including indefinite re-election for presidency and the right to declare state of
emergency to restrict certain civil rights as well as restrictions for recall referendums in
the future. But the reform package did not pass the referendum.
As the opposition gained confidence after defeating Chávez’s proposal to scrap
the term limits in 2007, they also had a better showing in the 2008 regional elections.
Pro-Chávez candidates got the majorities in governorships and mayoralties - winning 17
of the 22 governorships and 264 of the 326 mayoralties, opposition candidates won the
rest, wining in some important constituencies such as the Caracas metropolitan area
(Hidalgo 2009). Chávez’s drive to abolish term limits stand in sharp contrast with the
1961 constitution that prohibited reelection. The opposition gains and the economic
crisis convinced Chávez that it was time to push for constitutional change agenda.
When prices recovered, Chávez called for another referendum on term limits and won it
this time. The referendum removed term limits for president and all other elected
offices.
188
Opposition made significant gains in the parliamentary elections in 2010. But
due to the government’s expansive fiscal policy and high spending, presidential
popularity was very high. In lead-up to the 2012 elections, there were six candidates
running but the main competition was between two main candidates, Chávez as the
candidate of the Great Patriotic Pole (GPP) coalition led by the United Socialist Party
(PSUV) on the one hand, and governor of Miranda Henrique Capriles of the Democratic
Unity Roundtable (MUD) on the other. The MUD was formed from previously
disunited opposition group from both the right and left (Economist 2012). Capriles is a
governor of Miranda State, which encompasses large parts of Caracas.
Interesting to note, that being aware of the unpopularity of neoliberal paquetazo,
Capriles made sure that his proposed package of reforms was not seen as neoliberal
reform programme and even said he would keep the chavista social programmes intact
(Hidalgo 2013). In the October 2012 elections, he ran a very effective campaign
including advancing a social agenda akin to the moderate left model of Brazilian ex-
president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, without refuting that Chávez programs benefitted
the poor. Capriles remained non-confrontational throughout the campaign (Shifter
2012). Although Chávez won the election, he died in March 2013, and was succeeded
by a handpicked candidate Nicolas Maduro.
6.4.8. Personalism and the risks of diversification Chávez’s economic policies are poorly designed, “misguided” and shortsighted
(Weyland 2001) and despite the benefits of high oil prices, Chávez failed, just like his
predecessors, to redirect oil wealth to promote a more diversified structure. Chávez’s
popularity derives from the failure of the previous regime to deliver stable economic
growth and rampant corruption of the 1970s. Venezuelans believed that they should be
rich if only oil wealth could be properly managed and benefits fairly distributed. The
fact that about 70-80 percent of the people lived below poverty made it appallingly clear
that something was wrong. They blamed their politicians and elites of organized
interests in labor or business for their misfortune. This was the general perception of the
1990 that allowed an anti-system politician Chávez to get popular very quickly. Yet it
seems that despite their failures Punto Fijo presidents were willing to reform as, for
example, Andrés Pérez (II) who initiated a package of austerity measures, though
unsuccessfully.
189
6.5. Populism Populism is personalistic by definition, and oil clearly boosted populism in Venezuela.
Chávez ruled as a populist leader. Populism, as Weyland explains,
“revolves around personalistic leadership that feeds on quasi-direct links to a loosely organized mass of heterogeneous followers. Bypassing or subjugating intermediary institutions such as firmly organized parties, the leader -- often a charismatic figure -- establishes face-to-face contact with large numbers of citizens” (Weyland 2013).
Chávez’s weekly show Alo Presidente is a good illustration. Populism is driven by the
logic of personalism that does not tolerate institutional intermediaries. This same logic
compels a populist ruler to assault and dismantle institutional checks and balances. And
even though populism can be found in all sorts of regimes, it can flourish particularly
lavishly when state leaders enjoy discretionary control of resource rents.
Hawkins (2010) sees Chavismo as a populist movement in which chavismo is
more ideational, a worldview and a discourse, rather than clientelistic, and results from
the disappointment with the corruption of the previous system, with the failure to
implement rule of law. Chávez also claimed popular veneration and created a cult
around his personality. After his death, the successor leadership of Nicolas Maduro has
gone on to devise a civil religion around the figure of Chávez (Hernáiz and Smilde
2014).
6.6. The role of the military There is an element of personalism in bringing the military into politics. The military
basically loses its institutional autonomy and, as a result, is more tightly and directly
subordinated to the chief executive. The role of the oil boom is less clear here although
it is legitimate to say that oil affords more things, such as larger defense budgets. Civil
control of the military varied since the Punto Fijo pacto. During the first administrations
two parties were successful at controlling the armed forces thanks to a set of
institutional arrangements aimed at fragmenting the officer corps and financial inflows
in military budgets (Trinkunas 2002). However, beginning in the 1980s civilian control
began to weaken which allowed for two coups to occur in 1992. The plunge in oil prices
that began in 1982 led Andrés Pérez (II) to adopt unpopular policies that also meant
190
cutting defense budgets and benefits for officers. This draining of budgets contributed
to the widening of the cleavage between senior and junior officers as the juniors started
to perceive the senior echelons as corrupt due to their links to party leaders who were
generally seen as highly corrupt. One such group of disgruntled officers formed a group
in 1983 called Movimiento Bolivariano Revolucionario 200 (MBR-200) with
Bolivarian inspired nationalist and populist beliefs. President Perez knew about its
existence but tolerated it. After Andrés Pérez was impeached by Senate for corruption
charges, Rafael Caldera was elected president in 1994 with the plans to restore
confidence in the institutions of Punto Fijo. Yet, recession persisted and inflation rose
and poverty levels actually increased. President Caldera tried to put the military back
under civilian control and adopted measures to increase pays to keep the military
officers satisfied. The previous institutional arrangements were radically altered with
the election of Chávez, himself a military person. The key change concerned the level
of politicization of the military. As noted above, Chávez employed the military for the
purposes of internal security, public development and state administration. Military
officers were appointed to several key positions in the government. Chávez also
removed all who were suspected of disloyalty from key positions. The army personnel
were employed for carrying out social missions and Plan Bolivar 2000. These
programmes were funded through oil revenue. Notably, Chávez stopped allocation of
the funds initially allocated for regional governments and instead disbursed these funds
to military garrisons as the main executors of Plan Bolivar. Another key institutional
change concerned political oversight of the military which now was under sole
jurisdiction of the president. According to the new constitution, only president can
approve military promotions of colonels and generals eliminating legislative approval
required in the past. Chávez also abolished the previously administrative structure with
decentralized command in the military. In short, Trinkunas concludes, “The
Constitution of 1999 provides for personalized control of the military by the president”.
Norden (2008) argues that the military has been committed to democracy in
Venezuela and some factions supported Chávez coup because they believed that the
system has become too closed. According to the 1961 constitution, the military was
confined to be “apolitical, obedient and non-deliberating” institution responsible for the
stability of democratic system (cited in Norden 2008, n.p.). The new Bolivarian
191
constitution changed the status of the armed forces, relaxing the limits on its political
involvement and actually giving it the right to vote. It also clearly envisaged the
functions for the military in domestic development and keeping internal order. In other
words, the military was politicized and granted a role in implementing the revolutionary
programmes of the chavista. As a result, the military personnel were mobilized to work
on repairing schools and hospitals, working in social missions and public health
providers.
6.7. Corruption and mismanagement A large part of oil revenues under Chávez was transferred into off-budget funds
controlled personally by the president. This opened opportunities for corruption. State
agencies in Venezuela are notorious for their weak competence and mismanagement.
The country is ranked at the bottom of Corruption Perception Index, and there is a lack
of transparency regarding the spending of oil revenue, it is not even clear how much the
government has spent. What is clear is that billions were transferred from the PDVSA
to the off-budget FONDEN. In 2007 alone, the national oil company spent as much as
$14.4 billion on social programs which is a substantial jump from $6.9 billion spent in
2005 (Alvarez and Hanson 2009). It is also notable that just like governments in some
other oil-rich states, Chávez spent the oil windfall on military budget. In deals with
Russia, Venezuela spent about $4.3 billion on weapons (Alvarez and Hanson 2009).
6.8. Political movement, not a party The MVR that was officially registered in 1997 to back Chávez’s candidacy for
president in the 1998 elections was defined as a movement, rather than a political party,
and acted as both an electoral machine and “hit squads”.27 Chávez deliberately avoided
party building and instead created a number of “ephemeral” organizations to perform
specific electoral or political services, operating largely as “task forces”.28 Chavista
organizations were largely informally organized and were “superimposed on formal
authorities” (Alvarez 2006, 22). The status occupied by Chávez in these structures was
both the president of the party and the leader or “the supreme commander” (self
reference) of the informal structure. As the leader Chávez did not tolerate factionalism
27 The MVR was formed as a result of the transformation of a military group Movimiento Bolivariano Revolucionario (MBR) into a political movement 28 For a listing of these organizations, see Alvarez (2006, Table 2, p.23).
192
or internal dissidence. Those who hold a difference in opinion were either publicly
reprimanded or dismissed. For example, one of the co-founders of the MVR Luis
Miquilena was dismissed from the party for criticizing some of Chávez’s policies.
Appointments were personally done by Chávez often during one of his weekly televized
broadcasts. So “tactical” forces tasked with a specific mission were not overseen by
formal organs of the party, but instead reported directly to the president. Rank and file
members were organized into “circulos bolivarianos” as the basic cells of the MVR’s
informal structure. These circles, directly acting under the president’s control, were
involved in various tasks from ideological education electoral mobilization to
sometimes intimidation and violence. Their primary mission was to “to defend the
revolutions by all means”. These circles were abolished and reorganized into “Electoral
Battle Units” (UBEs) in 2004-2005. Such an adaptable and flexible structure helped
preserve the charisma of Chávez and also blocked the institutionalization of party
leadership, its consolidation into a bureaucratic organization capable of constraining
Chávez’s authority and challenge his dominance (Alvarez 2006).
6.9. Conclusion Chávez’s rule was characterized first and foremost by extreme personalism, and
unusually high concentration of power in the president’s hands. While high personalism
was a feature of initial years preceding the oil boom from 2003, personalistic tendencies
reached extreme levels during the oil boom. Oil certainly alleviated the need to tolerate
power-sharing like the one that existed under the Punto Fijo regime and helped
consolidate an extremely personalized system of government. The antecedent
conditions of democratic erosion and the failure to build a diversified economy by
previous governments as well as Coronil’s contention about the traditional perception of
the state as a magical state were perhaps unique to Venezuela and served as the enabling
conditions for the outcome.
The personalization under Chávez was so extreme that he was compared to
traditional caudillo rulers of the nineteenth century. Former communist guerrilla leader
Teodoro Petkoff described Chávez’s rule in the following words:
“Today all power is in Chávez’s hands. He is distrustful and does not consult with many people. He appoints and dismisses cabinet ministers on his weekly TV program. He has no time for the
193
mediocre leaders of the party he created [The Movement of the Fifth Republic (MVR)]. Fear and adulation surround ‘I the Supremo’” (cited in Gall 2006).
Weyland concurs stating that MVR is a loose movement with an eclectic
Bolivarian ideology which mixes nationalism, militarism, anti-imperialism, autocracy,
plebiscitarian and leftist marxist ideas, and is governed “not by institutional rules, but
by the personal dominance of a charismatic caudillo. Like other populists, Chávez
disdains any party institutionalization that might constrain his personal authority”
(Weyland 2001, 84).
194
Conclusion In the Introduction, I raised the question of whether oil wealth harms democratization
equally across authoritarian regimes. Having examined this question in a large dataset
covering the 1950-2010 period, I have found support for one exceptional pattern: oil has
an unequivocally harmful effect on the probability of a democratic transition in
personalist autocracies. While about 20 personalist regimes without oil wealth (such as
Bangladesh in 1990, Benin in 1990 and the Philippines in 1986) made transitions to
democracy, none of the personalist regimes with significant oil wealth experienced a
democratic transition.
This difference for democratization prospects is not observed in other types of
authoritarian rule. So if you take two party-based regimes, with oil and without oil,
there will be no difference, statistically speaking, in their chances to democratize. The
same is true for military and other types of autocracy. The negative effects of oil on
democratization disappear in the non-personalist subset once the data is split into
personalist and non-personalist regimes. These effects are significant only for the
personalist subset of autocratic regime types. These findings suggest that there must be
something special about personalism. Using the cases of Azerbaijan, Cameroon and
Venezuela, I demonstrate that oil and personalism are closely related and that in all
three cases oil fueled personalism through similar causal mechanisms. By reinforcing
personalist tendencies and stimulating the processes of personalization of power, oil
made transitions to democracy extremely difficult in Azerbaijan and Cameroon and has
complicated the return to democracy in post-Chávez Venezuela.
The distinct nature of personalism has been highlighted in the literature on
regime transitions. Recent studies have examined how differences in authoritarian rule
influence important political outcomes. Yet, the relevance of personalism for the
“political resource curse” has not been sufficiently recognized. Instead recent studies
have focused on the role of hegemonic parties as the key institutional conduit for oil’s
authoritarianism-enhancing effects. While in some cases, the authoritarian parties were
the key mechanisms and oil contributed to the endurance of party-based regimes, oil
does not seem to have prevented democratic transitions in this type of authoritarianism.
After all, party-based regimes in Mexico and Indonesia, to take the most prominent
examples from the developing world, did democratize, as did the military regimes in
195
Bolivia, Argentina and Ecuador. While recent studies have tried to explain this Latin
American anomaly by focusing on private inequality (Dunning 2008) and many would
argue that the strength of institutions (Robinson et al. 2006) or perhaps ownership of the
oil sector (Jones Luong and Weinthal 2010) mediate the effect of oil rents, I argue that
the type of authoritarian institutional structure is the key variable that makes a
difference. If personalist regimes are particularly severely affected by the curse of oil
wealth, then it is perhaps unsurprising that “crude democracies” are more likely to be
found in Latin America, than in the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa or post-Soviet
Central Asia, the three regions most commonly associated with the notion of personalist
and neopatrimonial rule, which might be related to the relatively late state-building in
these regions (Beissinger and Young 2002; Leftwich 2014).
Moreover, if oil is a curse for personalist (neopatrimonial) regimes, and not
other types of authoritarian rule, then the incentives and structures of this type of rule
must be more receptive to the effects of a resource curse. The case studies presented in
this study suggest that in societies as diverse as Azerbaijan, Cameroon and Venezuela,
oil fueled and supported their rulers’ drive to concentrate power in their hands, to
remove the checks and balances, to govern through informal patronage networks, and to
subordinate autonomous institutions to their whims. From all three cases, it is evident
that oil promoted personalistic or even sultanistic tendencies. Consequences of these
oil-fueled personalist tendencies for the prospects of democratization were enormously
damaging in all three cases.
Finally, my study demonstrates the usefulness of combining different research
strands in analyzing complex political phenomena. Literature on the oil curse and
research on comparative institutional authoritarianism have separately generated useful
insights but more integrative perspectives have been rare. The “new institutionalism of
authoritarianism” programme (Schedler 2009; 2013) is particularly promising. Other
scholars have emphasized the role of non-electoral political institutions more
traditionally associated with classic forms of nondemocratic rule, such as hegemonic
parties (Smith 2005; Brownlee 2007; Gandhi 2008; Magaloni 2008), the military (Bellin
2004), the royal court (Herb 1999), and patronage networks (Bratton and van de Walle
1997; Arriola 2009). The resource curse literature should pay more attention to the
differences in institutional-structural characteristics of authoritarian regimes. My study
196
also suggests that the causal channels underlying the effects of oil on the political
regime and regime outcomes (authoritarian durability and democratic transitions) may
not be uniform across regime types. This claim needs further investigation.
Finally, while the case of Venezuela under Chávez may be considered unique, it
illustrates how oil wealth contributed to the personalization of power in a failing
democracy. Since Venezuela is not the only case of a democracy with lots of oil, further
studies can examine whether oil had a similar effect on regime dynamics in other
democracies.
197
References Abbasov, Shahin. 2011. “Azerbaijan: Achievements and Missed Opportunities”. In
South Caucasus – 20 Years of Independence, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, pp. 108-122, http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/georgien/08706.pdf
Acemoglu Daron and James A. Robinson. 2006. Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Acemoglu, Daron and James A. Robinson. 2006. “Economic Backwardness in Political Perspective,” American Political Science Review 100 (1): 115-131.
Acemoglu, Daron and James Robinson. 2013. “Is There a Curse of Resources? The Case of Cameroon”, Why Nations Fail (blog), May 16, http://whynationsfail.com/blog/2013/5/16/is-there-a-curse-of-resources-the-case-of-the-cameroon.html
Acemoglu, Daron, James A. Robinson and Thierry Verdier. 2004. “Kleptocracy and Divide-and-Rule: A Model of Personal Rule”, Journal of the European Economic Association 2 (2-3): 162-192.
Acemoglu, Daron, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson. 2001. “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation”. American Economic Review 91 (5): 1369-1401.
Acemoglu, Daron, Simon Johnson, James A. Robinson and Pierre Yared. 2007. “Reevaluating the Modernization Hypothesis”. NBER Working Paper No. 13334.
Agayev, Boyukaga. 2007. “Azerbaijan: Splits at the Top”, Caucasus Reporting Service, Institute for War and Peace Reporting, no. 385, 3 April.
Ahmadov, Anar K. 2011. “A Conditional Theory of the ‘Political Resource Curse’: Oil, Autocrats, and Strategic Contexts”, PhD Diss., London School of Economics.
Ahmadov, Anar K. 2014. “Oil, Democracy, and Context A Meta-Analysis”, Comparative Political Studies 47 (9): 1238-1267.
Ahrend, Rudiger. 2006. “How to Sustain Growth in a Resource Based Economy?: The Main Concepts and their Application to the Russian Case”, OECD Working Papers, No. 478.
Akech, Migai. 2011. “Constraining Government Power in Africa”, Journal of Democracy 22 (1): 96-106.
Alexander, Robert. 1965. “Democratic Revolution in Venezuela”, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 358: 150-158.
Alieva, Leila. 2006. “Azerbaijan’s Frustrating Elections”, Journal of Democracy 17 (2): 147-160.
Alieva, Leila. 2009. “Azerbaijan: Power in the Petro-State”, in Michael Emerson, Richard Youngs (ed.), Democracy’s Plight in the European Neighbourhood: Struggling Transitions and Proliferating Dynasties, CEPS Paperbacks, Brussels: Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), pp. 112-119.
Aliyev, Natig, 2010. Neft’ i neftyanoy faktor v ekonomike Azerbaydzhana v XXI veke [Oil and the Oil Factor in the Economy of Azerbaijan in the 21st Century]. Baku, Letterpress.
198
Allina-Pisano, Jessica. 2010. “Social Contracts and Authoritarian Projects in Post-Soviet Space: The Use of Administrative Resource”, Communist and Post-Communist Studies 43 (4): 373-382.
Altstadt, Audrey. 1997. “Azerbaijan’s Struggle Toward Democracy”, in Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrott, eds., Conflict, Cleavage and Change in Central Asia and the Caucasus. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 133-137.
Altstadt, Audrey. 2003. “Azerbaijan and Aliyev: A Long History and an Uncertain Future”, Problems of Post-Communism 50 (5): 3-13.
Alvarez, Angel. 2006. “Social Cleavages, Political Polarization and Democratic Breakdown in Venezuela”, Stockholm Review of Latin American Studies No. 1, November.
Alvarez, Cesar and Stephanie Hanson. 2009. “Venezuela's Oil-based Economy”, CFR, February 9, 2009, http://www.cfr.org/world/venezuelas-oil-based-economy/p12089
Amnesty International. 2013. “Azerbaijan: Opposition Candidate Arrested Ahead of Presidential Elections”, February 6, http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/azerbaijan-stop-score-settling-arrests-2013-02-05
Amundsen, Inge. 2014. “Drowning in Oil: Angola’s Institutions and the ‘Resource Curse’”, Comparative Politics 46 (2): 169-189.
Andersen, Jørgen Juel and Michael Ross. 2011. “Making the Resource Curse Disappear: A Re-examination of Haber and Menaldo’s “Do Natural Resources Fuel Authoritarianism?” Unpublished paper, UCLA, available at http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/ross/workingpapers.html
Andersen, Jorgen Juel and Silje Aslaksen. 2010. “Oil and Political Survival”. Oslo University, Economic Department and ESOP. Working Paper, available at http://home.bi.no/a0810301/AndersenAslaksen2010.pdf
Anderson, Lisa. 1987. “The State in the Middle East and North Africa”, Comparative Politics 20 (1): 1-18.
Anderson, Lisa. 2006. “Searching Where the Light Shines: Studying Democratization in the Middle East”, Annual Review of Political Science 9: 189-214.
Andreski, Stanislav. 1968. The African Predicament: A Study in the Pathology of Modernization. New York: Atherton Press.
Arendt, Hannah. 1973 [1951]. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Arriola, Leonardo. 2009. “Patronage and Political Stability in Africa”, Comparative Political Studies 42 (10): 1339-1362.
Asadzade, Ulviyye and Ismayilova, Khadija. 2010. “Aliyev’s Azerbaijani Empire Grows, as Daughter Joins the Game’, RFE/RL, 13 August.
Aslaksen, Silje. 2010. “Oil and Democracy: More Than a Cross-country Correlation?” Journal of Peace Research 47 (4): 421-431.
Aslanli, Kenan. 2012. “Managing the State Oil Fund in Azerbaijan”. In A. Heinrich and H. Pleines (eds.), pp. 234-245.
199
Associated Press. 2005. “Opposition struggles in Azerbaijan”, June 30. Auty, Richard M. 1990. Resource-Based Industrialization: Sowing the Oil in Eight
Developing Countries. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Aves, Jonathan. 1996. “Post-Soviet Transcaucasia”, in Roy Allison, ed., Challenges for
the Former Soviet South. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press. Aves, Jonathan. 1996. “Politics, Parties and Presidents in Transcaucasia”, Caucasian
Regional Studies 1, http://poli.vub.ac.be/publi/crs/eng/0101-02.htm Avioutskii, Viatcheslav. 2007. “Les Clans en Azerbaïdjan”, Le Courrier des pays de
l’Est, No. 1063: 67-79. AzStat. State Statistical Committee of the Republic of Azerbaijan,
http://www.azstat.org/indexen.php. Bach, Daniel C. 2011. “Patrimonialism and Neopatrimonialism: Comparative
Trajectories and Readings”, Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 49 (3): 275-294.
Bacher, John. 2000. Petrotyranny. Toronto: Dundurn Press. Bagirov, Sabit, Ingilab Akhmedov and Svetlana Tsalik, 2003. “State Oil Fund of the
Azerbaijan Republic”, in Svetlana Tsalik, ed. Caspian Oil Windfalls: Who Will Benefit. New York: Open Society Institute.
Bagirov, Sabit. 2007. Oil of Azerbaijan: Revenues, Expenses and Risks (view from 2007). Budapest: Central European University.
Barnett, Steven and Rolando Ossowski. 2002. “Operational Aspects of Fiscal Policy in Oil-Producing Countries”, IMF Working Paper, October.
Barro, Robert J. 1999. “Determinants of Democracy”, Journal of Political Economy 107 (6): 158-183.
Basedau, Matthias. 2005. “Context Matters - Rethinking the Resource Curse in Sub-Saharan Africa”. Global and Area Studies Working Paper No.1. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=906983
Bayart, Jean-François. 1993. The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly. London: Longman.
Bayulgen, Oksan. 2005. “Foreign Capital in Central Asia and the Caucasus: Curse or Blessing?”, Communist and Post-Communist Studies 38 (1): 49-69.
BBC News. 2013. “Saddam’s 1979 Baath Party Purge”, 13 December, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-25363857.
Beblawi, Hazem. 1987. “The Rentier State in the Arab World”. In Hazem Beblawi and Giacomo Luciani, eds., The Rentier State: Essays in the Political Economy of Arab Countries. London, Croom Helm, pp. 49-62.
Beck, Martin and Simone Hüser. 2012. “Political Change in the Middle East: An Attempt to Analyze the ‘Arab Spring’”, GIGA Working Paper No. 203, August
Beissinger, Mark and Crawford Young, ed. 2002. Beyond State Crisis? Postcolonial Africa and Post-Soviet Eurasia in Comparative Perspective. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press.
200
Bellin, Eva. 2004. “The Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Exceptionalism in Comparative Perspective”, Comparative Politics 36 (2): 139-157.
Bendix, Reinhard. 1962. Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait. New York: Anchor Books.
Benjamin, Nancy and Shantayanan Devarajan. 1985. “Oil Revenues and Economic Policy in Cameroon”, World Bank Working Paper No. 745.
Benjamin, Nancy and Shantayanan Devarajan. 1986. “Oil Revenues and the Cameroonian Economy”. In M. G. Schatzberg and W. I. Zartman (eds.) The Political Economy of Cameroon. New York: Praeger Press.
Bennett, Andrew and Colin Elman. 2006. “Complex Causal Relations and Case Study Methods: The Example of Path Dependence”, Political Analysis 14 (3): 250-267.
Bermeo, Nancy. 1995. “Classification and Consolidation: Some Lessons from the Greek Dictatorship”, Political Science Quarterly 110 (3): 435-452.
Bertelsmann Stiftung, BTI 2010 - Azerbaijan Country Report. Gütersloh: Bertelsmann Stiftung.
Bertelsmann Stiftung, BTI 2012 - Azerbaijan Country Report. Gütersloh: Bertelsmann Stiftung.
Birdsall, Nancy and Arvind Subramanian. 2004. “Saving Iraq From Its Oil”, Foreign Affairs (July/August): 77-89.
Blaydes, Lisa. 2010. Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak’s Egypt. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Blondel, Jean and Ferdinand Müller-Rommel. 2007. “Political Elites” in Russell Dalton and Hans-Dieter Klingemann (eds.), Handbook of Political Behavior. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 818-832.
Bogaards, Matthijs. 2000. “Crafting Competitive Party Systems: Electoral Laws and the Opposition in Africa”, Democratization 7(4), 163-190.
Bogaards, Matthijs. 2004. “Counting Parties and Identifying Dominant Party Systems in Africa”, European Journal of Political Research 43 (2), 173-197.
Bogaards, Matthijs. 2009. “How to Classify Hybrid Regimes? Defective Democracy and Electoral Authoritarianism”, Democratization 16 (2): 399-423.
Bogaards, Matthijs. 2010. “Measures of Democratization: From Degree to Type to War”, Political Research Quarterly 63 (2): 475-488.
Boix, Carles and Susan Stokes. 2003. “Endogenous Democratization”, World Politics 55 (4): 517-549.
Boix, Carles. 2003. Democracy and Redistribution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
BP Statistical Review of World Energy June 2011, http://www.bp.com/statisticalreview
Bratton, Michael and Nicolas van de Walle. 1994. “Neopatrimonial Regimes and Political Transitions in Africa”, World Politics 46 (4): 453-89.
201
Bratton, Michael and Nicolas van de Walle. 1997. Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bratton, Michael. 2013. “Public Opinion and Democratic Consolidation”. In N. Cheeseman, D. Anderson and A. Scheibler (eds.) Routledge Handbook of African Politics. London and New York, Routledge, pp. 275-291.
Bräutigam, Deborah, Odd-Helge Fjeldstad and Mick Moore, ed. 2008. Taxation and State-building in Developing Countries: Capacity and Consent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bremmer, Ian and Robert Johnston. 2009. “The Rise and Fall of Resource Nationalism”, Survival 51 (2): 149-158.
Brooker, Paul. 2008. “Authoritarian Regimes”. In Daniele Caramani (eds.) Comparative Politics. Oxford University Press, pp. 133-156.
Brooker, Paul. 2000. Non-Democratic Regimes: Theory, Government and Politics. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Brownlee, Jason. 2007. Authoritarianism in an Age of Democratization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brownlee, Jason. 2009. “Portents of Pluralism: How Hybrid Regimes Affect Democratic Transitions”, American Journal of Political Science 53 (3): 515-532.
Bruce, Iain. 2008. The Real Venezuela: Making Socialism in the Twenty-first Century. London: Pluto Press.
Budget.az, http://www.budget.az/budget/main?content=327.
Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce and Alastair Smith. 2010. “Leader Survival, Revolutions, and the Nature of Government Finance”, American Journal of Political Science 54 (4): 936-950.
Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce, Alastair Smith, Randolph M. Silverson and James D. Morrow. 2003. The Logic of Political Survival. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Bunce, Valerie and Sharon Wolchik. 2006. “Favorable Conditions and Electoral Revolutions”, Journal of Democracy 17 (4): 5-18.
Bunce, Valerie and Sharon Wolchik. 2008. “Azerbaijan’s 2005 Parliamentary Elections: A Failed Attempt at Transition”, CDDRL Working Paper, No. 89.
Bunce, Valerie and Sharon Wolchik. 2010. “Defeating Dictators: Electoral Change and Stability in Competitive Authoritarian Regimes”, World Politics 62 (1): 43-86.
Busse, Matthias and Steffen Gröning. 2011. “The Resource Curse Revisited: Governance and Natural Resources”, Hamburg Institute of International Economics, Research Paper No. 106, available at http://www.hwwi.org/uploads/tx_wilpubdb/HWWI_Research_Paper_106.pdf
Buxton, Julia. 1999. “Venezuela: Degenerative Democracy”, Democratization 6 (1): 246-270.
Callaghy, Thomas M. 1984. The State-Society Struggle. Zaire in Comparative Perspective. New York: Columbia University Press.
202
Canache, Damarys. 2004. “Urban Poor and the Political Order”. In Jennifer L. McCoy and David J. Myers (eds.). The Unraveling of Representative Democracy in Venezuela. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press.
Canache, Damarys. 2007. “Chavismo and Democracy in Venezuela”, Paper presented at the Symposium on “Prospects for Democracy in Latin America,” University of North-Texas, April 5-6, http://pdfs.postprefix.com/venezuela/canache.pdf
Caracas Chronicles. 2003. “The Petrostate that was and the Petrostate that is”, February 14, http://caracaschronicles.blogspot.de/2003/02/petrostate-that-was-and-petrostate.html
Carothers, Thomas. 2002. “The End of the Transition Paradigm”, Journal of Democracy 13 (1): 5-21.
Carothers, Thomas. 2009. “Stepping Back from Democratic Pessimism”, Carnegie Papers No. 99. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Chang, Eric, and Miriam A. Golden. 2010. “Sources of Corruption in Authoritarian Regimes”, Social Science Quarterly 91 (1): 1-20.
Charap Joshua and Christian Harm. 1999. “Institutionalized Corruption and the Kleptocratic State”, IMF Working Paper WP/99/91, Washington, DC: IMF, http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/1999/wp9991.pdf
Chaudhry, Kiren Aziz. 1989. “The Price of Wealth: Business and State in Labor Remittance and Oil Economies”, International Organization 43 (1): 101-145.
Chaudhry, Kiren Aziz. 1994. “Economic Liberalization and the Lineages of the Rentier State”, Comparative Politics 27 (1): 1-25.
Chaudhry, Kiren Aziz. 1997. The Price of Wealth: Economies and Institutions in the Middle East. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Chehabi, Houchang and Juan J. Linz, ed. 1998. Sultanistic Regimes. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Cheterian, Vicken. 2010. “Azerbaijan”. In Abel Polese and Donnacha O’Beachain (eds.), The Colour Revolutions in the Former Soviet Republics: Successes and Failures, London: Routledge, pp. 101-117.
Chhibber, Pradeep K. 1996. “State Policy, Rent Seeking, and the Electoral Success of a Religious Party in Algeria”, Journal of Politics 58 (1): 126-148.
Clapham, Christopher. 1985. Third World Politics: An Introduction. London: Croom Helm.
Collier, David, ed. 1979. The New Authoritarianism in Latin America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Collier, David and Steven Levitsky. 1997. “Democracy with Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Research”, World Politics 49 (3): 430-51.
Collier, Paul. 2007. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cook, Steven. 2007. Ruling but Not Governing: The Military and Political Development in Egypt, Algeria, and Turkey. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
203
Cooley, Alexander A. 2001. “Review: Booms and Busts: Theorizing Institutional Formation and Change in Oil States”, Review of International Political Economy 8 (1): 163-180.
Coppedge, Michael. 1994. Strong Parties and Lame Ducks: Presidential Patriarchy and Factionalism in Venezuela. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Corden, W. M. 1984. “Booming Sector and Dutch Disease Economics: Survey and Consolidation”, Oxford Economic Papers 36 (3): 359-380.
Coronil, Fernando. 1997. The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Corrales, Javier. 2006. “Hugo Boss”, Foreign Policy 152, 32-40. Corrales, Javier. 2011. “A Setback for Chávez”, Journal of Democracy 22 (1), 122-136. Corrales, Javier. 2012. “How Chávez Does Business”, Foreign Affairs, October 4. Corrales, Javier, and Michael Penfold. 2007. “Venezuela: Crowding out the
Opposition”, Journal of Democracy 18 (2), 99-113. Corrales, Javier, and Michael Penfold. 2011. Dragon in the Tropics: Hugo Chávez and
the Political Economy of Revolution in Venezuela. Washington: Brookings Institution Press.
Cossé, Stéphane. 2006. Strengthening Transparency in the Oil Sector in Cameroon: Why Does it Matter? IMF Policy Discussion Paper 06/2.
Crisp, Brian F. 1999. “Venezuela: The Character, Crisis, and Possible Future of Democracy”, World Affairs 161:123-165.
Crystal, Jill. 1990. Oil and Politics in the Gulf: Rulers and Merchants in Kuwait and Qatar. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Cuaresma, Jesus Crespo, Harald Oberhofer, and Paul A. Raschky. 2011. “Oil and the Duration of Dictatorships”, Public Choice 148 (3-4): 505-530.
Dahl, Robert A. 1971. Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Davis, Graham A. 1995. “Learning to Love the Dutch Disease: Evidence from the Mineral Economies”, World Development 23 (10): 1765-1779.
de Morais, Rafael Marques. 2011. “Corruption in Angola: An Impediment to Democracy”, Presentation at National Endowment for Democracy, May http://www.ned.org/events/corruption-in-angola-an-impediment-to-democracy
De Soysa, Indra. 2002. “Ecoviolence: Shrinking Pie or Honey Pot?”, Global Environmental Politics 2 (4): 1-34.
De Waal, Thomas. 2003. “First Dynasty”, The World Today 59 (10): 26-27. Delacroix, Jacques. 1980. “The Distributive State in the World System”, Studies in
Comparative International Development 15 (3): 3-21. Delany, William. 1962. “The Development and Decline of Patrimonial and Bureaucratic
Administration”, Administrative Science Quarterly 7 (4): 458-501. Diamond, Larry. 1999. Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation. Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
204
Diamond, Larry. 2002. “Thinking About Hybrid Regimes”, Journal of Democracy 13 (2): 21-35.
Diamond, Larry. 2008. “The Democratic Rollback: The Resurgence of the Predatory State”, Foreign Affairs 87 (2): 36-48.
Dicklitch, Susan. 2002. “Failed Democratic Transition in Cameroon: A Human Rights Explanation”, Human Rights Quarterly 24:1, 152-176.
Diermeier, Daniel, and Keith Krehbiel. 2003. “Institutionalism as a Methodology”, Journal of Theoretical Politics 15 (2): 123-144.
Dilavarli, Kebiran. 2009. “Nazir Ziya Məәmməәdov, oğlu Anar Məәmməәdov vəә ZQAN Holdinq”, Azadliq.org – RFE/RL Azerbaijani Service, 5 December.
Dunning, Thad. 2005. “Resource Dependence, Economic Performance, and Political Stability”, Journal of Conflict Resolution 49 (4): 451-482.
Dunning, Thad. 2008. Crude Democracy: Natural Resource Wealth and Political Regimes. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Dunning, Thad. 2009. “Natural Resources and Democracy in Latin America”. IBRD Background paper, September 14, http://bit.ly/1xx7g7E
Earle, Timothy. 1997. How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Eaton, Kent. 2013. “The Centralism of ‘Twenty-First-Century Socialism’: Recentralizing Politics in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia”, Journal of Latin American Studies 45 (3): 421-450.
Economist Intelligence Unit. 2004. Country Report: Azerbaijan, February. Economist Intelligence Unit. 2010a. Democracy Index: Democracy in Retreat.
http://graphics.eiu.com/PDF/Democracy_Index_2010_web.pdf Economist Intelligence Unit. 2010b. “Azerbaijan: Risk Ratings”, 4 October. Economist. 1977. “The Dutch Disease”. November 26. Economist. 2008. “Cameroon: Another President Who Won’t Go”, February 28,
http://www.economist.com/node/10766768 Economist. 2011. “Azerbaijan. How to Spend it”. November 12. print edition,
http://www.economist.com/node/21538212 Economist. 2012. “The Autocrat and the Ballot Box”, September 29,
http://www.economist.com/node/21563706 Ekiert, Grzegorz, Jan Kubik and Milada Anna Vachudova. 2007. “Democracy in the
Post-Communist World: An Unending Quest?” East European Politics and Societies 21 (1): 7-30.
El Universal. 2009. “Chávez Rebuts Supporters’ Criticisms Against his ‘Hyper-leadership’”, Caracas, June 15.
Ellner, Steve. 2001. “The Radical Potential of Chavismo in Venezuela: The First Year and a Half in Power”, Latin American Perspectives 28(5): 5-32.
Ellner, Steve. 2011. “Venezuela’s Social-Based Model: Innovations and Limitations”, Journal of Latin American Studies 43 (3): 421-449.
205
Energy Information Administration (EIA). 2012. Azerbaijan Country Analysis Brief, January.
Epstein, David, Robert Bates, Jack Goldstone, Ida Kristensen and Sharyn O’Halloran. 2006. “Democratic Transitions”, American Journal of Political Science 50 (3): 551-569.
Erdmann, Gero and Ulf Engel. 2007. “Neopatrimonialism Reconsidered: Critical Review and Elaboration of an Elusive Concept”, Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 45 (1): 95-119.
Esslemont, Tom. 2010. “Struggle for Central Asian Energy Riches. Azeri elite”, BBC News, June 2
Evans, Peter. 1989. “Predatory, Developmental, and Other Apparatuses: A Comparative Political Economy Perspective on the Third World State”, Sociological Forum 4 (4): 561-87.
Ezrow, Natasha M. and Erica Frantz. 2011. Dictators and Dictatorships: Understanding Authoritarian Regimes and Their Leaders. New York, NY: Continuum Books.
Falkowski, Maciej. 2009. “Azerbaijan: Subterranean Rumblings”, Transitions Online, November 23.
Falleti, Tulia G. and Julia F. Lynch. 2009. “Context and Causal Mechanisms in Political Analysis”, Comparative Political Studies 42 (9): 1143-1116.
Fearon, James and David Laitin. 2005. “Cameroon”, Unpublished paper, http://www.stanford.edu/group/ethnic/Random%20Narratives/CameroonRN1.5.pdf
Fish, M. Steven and Jason Wittenberg. 2009. “Failed Democratization”. In C. W. Haerpfer, P. Bernhagen, R. Inglehart and C. Welzel (ed.) Democratization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 249-265.
Fish, M. Steven. 2002. “Islam and Authoritarianism”, World Politics 55 (1): 4-37. Fish, M. Steven. 2005. Democracy Derailed in Russia: The Failure of Open Politics.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fjelde, Hanne. 2009. “Buying Peace? Oil Wealth, Corruption and Civil War, 1985-99”,
Journal of Peace Research 46 (2): 199-218. Forero, Juan. 2009. “Chávez Wins Removal of Term Limits”, Washington Post,
February 16, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/15/AR2009021500136.html
Franke, Anja, Andrea Gawrich, Gurban Alakbarov. 2009. “Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan as Post-Soviet Rentier States: Resource Incomes and Autocracy as a Double ‘Curse’ in Post-Soviet Regimes”, Europe-Asia Studies 61 (1): 109-140.
Frantz, Erica and Natasha M. Ezrow. 2011. The Politics of Dictatorship: Institutions and Outcomes in Authoritarian Regimes. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Frantz, Erica, Barbara Geddes and Joseph Wright. 2014. “How Oil Helps Dictatorships Survive”, Washington Post, The Monkey Cage blog, June 17, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/06/17/how-oil-helps-dictatorships-survive/
206
Freedom House. 2007. Freedom in the World, Cameroon Country Report. Freedom House. 2010. “Freedom in the World”. http://www.freedomhouse.org. Freedom House. 2011. Freedom in the World, Azerbaijan Country Report. Freedom House. 2012. Electoral Democracy Numbers”, Freedom in the World 2012,
http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2012. Freedom House. 2013. Freedom in the World.
http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2013 Friedman, Thomas. 2006. “The First Law of Petropolitics”, Foreign Policy, May/June. Friedrich, Carl J. and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski. 1956. Totalitarian Dictatorship and
Autocracy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Fuller, Elizabeth. 1996. “Azerbaijan at the Crossroads”. In Roy Allison (ed.) Challenges
for the Former Soviet South. Brookings Institution Press, Washington, D.C., pp. 117-153.
Fuller, Liz and Richard Giragosian. 2010. “Azerbaijan’s Unsinkable General”, RFE/RL Caucasus Report, March 14.
Gabriel, Jürg Martin. 1999. “Cameroon’s Neopatrimonial Dilemma”, Journal of Contemporary African Studies 17 (2), 173-196.
Gaddy, Clifford G. and Barry W. Ickes. 2013. “Russia: Caught in the Bear Trap”, Legatum Institute, November, http://www.li.com/publications/caught-in-the-bear-trap.
Gahramanova, Aytan. 2009. “Internal and External Factors in the Democratization of Azerbaijan”, Democratization 16 (4): 777-803.
Gall, Norman. 2006. “Oil and Democracy in Venezuela”, Part 1: Why Chávez? Part 2: The Bolivarian Revolution”, Braudel Papers Nos. 39/ 40.
Gaman-Golutvina, Oxana. 2007. “Political Elites in the Commonwealth of Independent States: Recruitment and Rotation Tendencies”, Comparative Sociology 6: 136-157.
Gandhi, Jennifer and Adam Przeworski. 2006. “Cooperation, Cooptation, and Rebellion under Dictatorships”, Economics and Politics 18 (1): 1-26.
Gandhi, Jennifer and Adam Przeworski. 2007. “Authoritarian Institutions and the Survival of Autocrats”, Comparative Political Studies 40 (11): 1279-1301.
Gandhi, Jennifer. 2008. Political Institutions under Dictatorship. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Gasiorowski, Mark. 1995. “Economic Crisis and Political Regime Change: An Event History Analysis”, American Political Science Review 89 (4): 882-897.
Gassebner, Martin, Michael J. Lamla, and James R. Vreeland. 2009. “Extreme Bounds of Democracy”. KOF Working Paper No. 224, http://ssrn.com/abstract=1392266
Gat, Azar. 2007. “The Return of Authoritarian Great Powers”, Foreign Affairs 86 (4): 59-69.
Gause, F. Gregory, III. 1994. Oil Monarchies: Domestic and Security Challenges in the Arab Gulf States. New York: Council on Foreign Relations.
207
Gauthier, Bernard and Albert Zeufack, 2010. “Governance and Oil Revenues in Cameroon”, OxCarre Working Papers 038, Oxford Centre for the Analysis of Resource Rich Economies, University of Oxford, http://www.oxcarre.ox.ac.uk/images/stories/papers/RevenueWatch/oxcarrerp201038.pdf
Gawrich, Andrea, Anja Franke and Jana Windwehr. ed., 2011. Are Resources a Curse?: Rentierism and Energy Policy in Post-Soviet States. Opladen: Barbara Budrich Publishers.
Geddes, Barbara. 1990. “How the Cases You Choose Affect the Answers You Get”, Political Analysis 2, 131-150.
Geddes, Barbara. 1995. “The Politics of Economic Liberalization”, Latin American Research Review 30 (2): 195-214.
Geddes, Barbara. 1999. “What Do We Know About Democratization after Twenty Years?”. Annual Review of Political Science 2: 115-144.
Geddes, Barbara. 2003. Paradigms and Sand Castles: Research Design in Comparative Politics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Geddes, Barbara. 2009. “What Causes Democratization?” In Carles Boix and Susan C. Stokes (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 317-339.
Geddes, Barbara, Joseph Wright, and Erica Frantz. 2014. “Autocratic Breakdown and Regime Transitions: A New Data Set,” Perspectives on Politics 12 (2): 313-331.
Gelb, Alan and Associates. 1988. Oil Windfalls: Blessing or Curse? New York: Oxford University Press.
George, Alexander and Andrew Bennett. 2005. Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press.
Gerring, John. 2007. Case Study Research: Principles and Practices. New York and Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Gervasoni, Carlos. 2010. “A Rentier Theory of Subnational Regimes: Fiscal Federalism, Democracy, and Authoritarianism in the Argentine Provinces”, World Politics 62 (2): 302-340.
Gilley, Bruce and Heike Holbig. 2009. “The Debate on Party Legitimacy in China: a Mixed Quantitative/qualitative Analysis”, Journal of Contemporary China 18 (59): 339-335.
Gleditsch, Kristian and Jinhee Lee Choung. 2004. “Autocratic Transitions and Democratization”, Paper for the Annual International Studies Association Convention, Montreal. http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~ksg/papers/GROW_transitions.pdf
Gojayev, Vugar. 2010. “Resource Nationalism Trends in Azerbaijan, 2004-2009”, RussCasp Working Paper, March.
Goldberg, Ellis, Erik Wibbels and Eric Mvukiyehe. 2008. “Lessons from Strange Cases: Democracy, Development, and the Resource Curse in the U.S. States”, Comparative Political Studies 41 (4/5): 477-514.
208
Goldman, Marshall I. 2008. Petrostate: Putin, Power, and the New Russia. Oxford University Press.
Goldstone, Jack. 1982. “The Comparative and Historical Study of Revolutions”, Annual Review of Sociology 8: 187-207.
Goldstone, Jack. 2011. “Understanding the Revolutions of 2011: Weakness and Resilience in Middle Eastern Autocracies”, Foreign Affairs, May/June.
Goodwin, Jeff and Theda Skocpol. 1989. “Explaining Revolutions in the Contemporary Third World”, Politics and Society 17 (4): 489-509.
Goodwin, Jeff. 2001. No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945-1991. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Green, Sarah, 2013. “Venezuela’s Chance to Escape the ‘Resource Curse’”, HBR blog, March 8.
Greene, Kenneth F. 2007. Why Dominant Parties Lose, Mexico’s Democratization in Comparative Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Greene, Kenneth. 2010. “The Political Economy of Single-Party Dominance”, Comparative Political Studies 43 (7): 807-834.
Guevara, Aleida. 2005. Chávez, Venezuela and the New Latin America: An Interview with Hugo Chávez. New York: Ocean Press.
Guliyev, Farid. 2005. “Post-Soviet Azerbaijan: Transition to Sultanistic Semiauthoritarianism? An Attempt at Conceptualization”, Demokratizatsiya 13 (3): 393-435.
Guliyev, Farid. 2009a. “Oil Wealth, Patrimonialism, and the Failure of Democracy in Azerbaijan”, Caucasus Analytical Digest, No. 2, January 15.
Guliyev, Farid. 2009b. “End of Term Limits: Monarchical Presidencies on the Rise”, Harvard International Review, February 28.
Guliyev, Farid. 2011. “Personal Rule, Neopatrimonialism, and Regime Typologies: Integrating Dahlian and Weberian Approaches to Regime Studies”, Democratization 18 (3): 575-601.
Guliyev, Farid. 2012. “Political Elites in Azerbaijan”. In A. Heinrich and H. Pleines (eds.) Challenges of the Caspian Resource Boom, pp. 117-130.
Guliyev, Farid and Katy Pearce. 2013. “The Challenges of Electoral Competition in an Oil Rich State: Azerbaijani Pre-Election Report”, Washington Post, The Monkey Cage blog, October 6.
Gurses, Mehmet. 2009. “State-sponsored Development, Oil and Democratization”, Democratization 16 (3): 508-529.
Gurses. Mehmet. 2011. “Elites, Oil, and Democratization: A Survival Analysis”, Social Science Quarterly 92 (1): 164-184.
Guseynov, Vagif. 2004. “Aliyev posle Aliyeva”, Vestnik Analitiki, No. 2 (16): 19-37. GWF dataset. “Autocratic Regime Data and Codebook, http://sites.psu.edu/dictators/ Gylfason, Thorvaldur. 2001. “Natural Resources, Education, and Economic
Development”, European Economic Review 45 (4-6): 847-859.
209
Haber, Stephen. 2006. “Authoritarian Government.” In Barry Weingast and Donald Wittman (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 693-707.
Haber, Stephen and Victor Menaldo. 2011. “Do Natural Resources Fuel Authoritarianism? A Reappraisal of the Resource Curse”, American Political Science Review 105 (1): 1-26.
Hadenius, Axel and Jan Teorell. 2007. “Pathways from Authoritarianism”, Journal of Democracy 18 (1): 143-156.
Haggard, Stephan and Robert R. Kaufman. 1995. The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Haggard, Stephan and Robert R. Kaufman. 1997. “The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions”. Comparative Politics 29 (3): 263-283.
Hale, Henry. 2005. “Regime Cycles: Democracy, Autocracy, and Revolution in Post-Soviet Eurasia”, World Politics 58 (1): 133-165.
Hale, Henry. 2006. “Democracy or Autocracy on the March? The Colored Revolutions as Normal Dynamics of Patronal Presidentialism”, Communist and Post-Communist Studies 39 (3): 305-329.
Hale, Henry. 2010. “Eurasian polities as hybrid regimes: The Case of Putin’s Russia”, Journal of Eurasian Studies 1 (1): 33-41.
Hall, Peter and Rosemary Taylor. 1996. “Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms”, Political Studies 44 (5): 936-957.
Hammouya, Messaoud. 1999. Statistics on Public Sector Employment: Methodology, Structure and Trends. Geneva: International Labor Office.
Hawkins, Kirk A. 2010. Venezuela’s Chavismo and Populism in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge University Press.
Heinemann-Grüder, Andreas. 2012. “Patron-Client Relations: Explanations and Conceptual Promises”. In A. Heinrich and H. Pleines (eds.), pp. 58-69.
Heinrich, Andreas and Heiko Pleines, eds., 2012. Challenges of the Caspian Resource Boom. Domestic Elites and Policy-Making. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Heinrich, Andreas. 2010. “The Formal Political System of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. A Background Study”. Bremen: Forschungsstelle Osteuropa, Working paper No. 107.
Heinrich, Andreas. 2011. “Challenges of a Resource Boom: Review of the Literature”. Research Centre for East European Studies, University of Bremen. Working Paper No. 114, April, http://ssrn.com/abstract=1851525
Hellman, Joel S., Geraint Jones, and Daniel Kaufmann. 2000 “Seize the State, Seize the Day: State Capture, Corruption, and Influence in Transition.” World Bank Working Paper No. 2444, available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=240555
Herb, Michael. 1999. All in the Family: Absolutism, Revolution, and Democratic Prospects in the Middle Eastern Monarchies. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
210
Herb, Michael. 2005. “No Representation without Taxation? Rents, Development, and Democracy”, Comparative Politics 37 (3): 297-317.
Herbst, Jeffrey. 1990. “The Structural Adjustment of Politics in Africa”, World Development 18 (7): 949-958.
Hernáiz, Hugo Pérez and David Smilde. 2014. “In the Face of Uncertainty, A Ritual Calendar”, Venezuela Blog, June 20.
Hicken, Alan. 2011. “Clientelism”, Annual Review of Political Science 14: 289-310. Hidalgo, Manuel. 2009. “Hugo Chávez’s ‘Petro-socialism’”, Journal of Democracy 20
(2): 78-92. Hidalgo, Manuel. 2013. “The 2012 and 2013 Presidential Elections in Venezuela”,
Electoral Studies, DOI: 10.1016/j.electstud.2013.12.007. Higley, John and Michael Burton. 1989. “The Elite Variable in Democratic Transitions
and Breakdowns”, American Sociological Review 54 (1): 17-32. Higley, John and Richard Gunther. eds. 1992. Elites and Democratic Consolidation in
in Latin America and Southern Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hodges, Tony. 2004. Angola: Anatomy of an Oil State. The Fridtjof Nansen Institute;
Oxford: James Currey and Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2nd ed. Hoffman, David. 1999. “Oil and Development in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan”. In The
National Bureau of Asian Research (ed.) Energy, Wealth, and Development in Central Asia and the Caucasus, NBR Analysis 10 (3), pp. 5-28.
Holley, David. 2007. “Azerbaijan Political Divide Deepens”, Los Angeles Times, July 14, from Factiva database: http://global.factiva.com/.
Howard, Marc and Philip Roessler. 2006. “Liberalizing Electoral Outcomes in Competitive Authoritarian Regimes”, American Journal of Political Science 50 (2): 365-81.
Humphreys, Macartan, Jeffrey D. Sachs and Joseph E. Stiglitz. eds., 2007. Escaping the Resource Curse. New York: Columbia University Press.
Huntington, Samuel P. 1968. Political Order in Changing Societies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Huntington, Samuel P. 1970. “Social and Institutional Dynamics of One-Party Systems”. In Samuel Huntington and Clement Moore (eds.) Authoritarian Politics in Modern Society. New York: Basic Books, pp. 3-47.
Huntington, Samuel P. 1991. The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.
Huntington, Samuel P. 1991-92. “How Countries Democratize”, Political Science Quarterly 106 (4): 579-616.
Huntington, Samuel P. and Clement Moore. 1970. Authoritarian Politics in Modern Society: The Dynamics of Established One-Party Systems. New York: Basic Books.
Hutchcroft, Paul D. 1991. “Oligarchs and Cronies in the Philippine State: The Politics of Patrimonial Plunder”, World Politics 43 (3): 414-50.
211
Hyden, Goran. 2006. African Politics in Comparative Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
IMF Republic of Azerbaijan Article IV Consultation, various years. IMF Republic of Azerbaijan: 2010 Article IV Consultation – Staff Report, May,
http://tinyurl.com/85tgrw5. Immergut, Ellen. 1998. “The Theoretical Core of the New Institutionalism”, Politics
and Society 26 (1): 5-34. International Crisis Group (ICG). 2004. “Azerbaijan: Turning over a New Leaf?”, ICG
Europe Report, No. 156, May 13. International Crisis Group (ICG). 2008. “Azerbaijan: Defence Sector Management and
Reform”, Europe Briefing No. 50, October 29. International Crisis Group (ICG). 2010a. “Azerbaijan: Vulnerable Stability”, ICG
Europe Report No. 207, September 3. International Crisis Group (ICG). 2010b. “Cameroon: The Dangers of a Fractured
Regime”, Africa Report No. 161, June. International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP). 1990. “Development of the Oil
Industry in Cameroon and its Implications for Education and Training”, Research report No. 79, Paris.
Isaacs, Rico. 2010. “Informal Politics and the Uncertain Context of Transition: Revisiting Early Stage Non-Democratic Development in Kazakhstan”, Democratization 17 (1): 1-25.
Isaacs, Rico. 2014. “Neopatrimonialism and Beyond: Reassessing the Formal and Informal in the Study of Central Asian Politics”, Contemporary Politics 20 (2): 229-245.
Isayev, Ramin. 2008. “Commentary: Resource Depletion, Dependence, and Development in Azerbaijan”, Chatham House, Working Paper.
Ishiyama, John. 2002. “Neopatrimonialism and the Prospects for Democratization in the Central Asian Republics”. In Sally Cummings (ed.) Power and Change in Central Asia. London: Routledge, pp. 4-58.
Ismael, Jacqueline S. 1993. Kuwait: Dependency and Class in a Rentier State. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Ismailzade, Fariz. 2004. “Generational Change Occurs Amid Political Infighting within Azerbaijan’s Ruling Party”, Eurasianet.Org, 15 August.
Ismayilova, Khadija. 2011a, ‘“Azəәrfon”a İlham ƏӘliyevin qızlarına məәxsus Panama şirkəәtləәri nəәzarəәt edir”, Azadliq.org – RFE/RL Azerbaijani Service, 28 June.
Ismayilova, Khadija. 2011b, “Azerbaijani President’s Daughters Tied to Fast-rising Telecoms Firm”, RFE/RL, 27 June.
Jackson, Robert H. and Carl G. Rosberg. 1982. Personal Rule in Black Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Jackson, Robert H. and Carl G. Rosberg. 1984. “Personal Rule: Theory and Practice in Africa”, Comparative Politics 16 (4): 421-442.
212
James, Ian. 2012. “Chávez's Record: An Oil Bonanza Squandered?” AFP, September 22.
Jensen, Nathan and Leonard Wantchekon. 2004. “Resource Wealth and Political Regimes in Africa”, Comparative Political Studies 37 (7): 816-881.
Johnson, Charles W. 2006. “Improving Program Design and Management to Enhance Anti-corruption Impact in the USAID Azerbaijan Portfolio”, Paper by Development Alternatives Inc. for USAID/Caucasus-Azerbaijan, January.
Jones Luong, Pauline and Erika Weinthal. 2006. “Rethinking the Resource Curse: Ownership Structure, Institutional Capacity, and Domestic Constraints”, Annual Review of Political Science 9: 241-263.
Jones Luong, Pauline and Erika Weinthal. 2010. Oil Is Not a Curse: Ownership Structure and Institutions in Soviet Successor States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jones, Benjamin F. and Benjamin A. Olken. 2005. “Do Leaders Matter? National Leadership and Growth Since World War II”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 120(3): 835-864.
Joseph, Richard. 1987. Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria: The Rise and Fall of the Second Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kamrava, Mehran. 1998. “Non-Democratic States and Political Liberalization in the Middle East: A Structural Analysis”, Third World Quarterly 19 (1): 63-85.
Kamrava, Mehran. 2001. “State-Building in Azerbaijan: The Search for Consolidation”, Middle East Journal 55 (2): 216-236.
Kara, Ahmet. 2007. “The Parliamentary Elections in Azerbaijan, November 2005 and May 2006”, Electoral Studies 26 (3): 720-724.
Karl, Terry Lynn. 1987. “Petroleum and Political Pacts: The Transition to Democracy in Venezuela”, Latin American Research Review 22 (1): 63-94.
Karl, Terry Lynn. 1997. The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petro-States. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Karl, Terry Lynn. 1999. “The Perils of Petroleum: Reflections on The Paradox of Plenty”, Journal of International Affairs 53 (1): 31-48.
Karl, Terry Lynn. 2004. “The Social and Political Consequences of Oil”. In Cutler Cleveland (ed.) Encyclopedia of Energy, Vol. 4. San Diego: Elsevier, pp. 661-672.
Karl, Terry Lynn. 2008. “Democracy over a Barrel: Oil, Regime Change and War”. Presentation at the Center for the Study of Democracy, University of California Irvine, http://escholarship.org/uc/item/9kq895kt
Karl, Terry Lynn and Ian Gary. 2004. “Oil & Development. The Global Record.” Foreign Policy in Focus, PetroPolitics special report.
Kechichian, Joseph A. and Theodore Karasik. 1995. “The Crisis in Azerbaijan: How Clans Influence the Politics of an Emerging Republic”, Middle East Policy 4(1-2): 57-71.
213
Kim, Younkyoo. 2003. The Resource Curse in a Post-Communist Regime: Russia in Comparative Perspective. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.
Kitschelt, Herbert et al. 1999. Post-communist Party Systems. Competition, Representation, and Inter-party Collaboration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kjærnet, Heidi. 2012. “National Oil Companies and the State”. In A. Heinrich and H. Pleines (eds.), pp. 191-204.
Kleinbaum, David G. and Mitchel Klein. 2005. Survival Analysis: A Self-learning Text. New York: Springer Science & Business Media, Inc.
Kobrin, Stephen J. 1985. “Diffusion as an Explanation of Oil Nationalization or the Domino Effect Rides Again”, Journal of Conflict Resolution 29 (1): 3-32.
Kofele-Kale, Ndiva. 1986. “Ethnicity, Regionalism, and Political Power: A Post-Mortem of Ahidjo’s Cameroon”. In M. G. Schatzberg and W. I. Zartman (eds.) The Political Economy of Cameroon. New York: Praeger.
Kohli, Atul. 2004. State-Directed Development: Political Power and Industrialization in the Global Periphery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Konings, Piet. 1996. “The Post-Colonial State and Political and Economic Reforms in Cameroon”. In A. E. Fernandez Jilberto and A. Mommen (eds.) Liberalization in the Developing World: Institutional and Economic Changes in Latin America, Africa and Asia. London: Routledge.
Krieger, Milton. 1994. “Cameroon’s Democratic Crossroads, 1990-1994”, Journal of Modern African Studies 32: 4, 605-628.
Kurer, Oskar. 1996. “The Political Foundations of Economic Development Policies”, Journal of Development Studies 32 (5): 645-668.
Kusznir, Julia. 2012. “The Role of the Oil Elite in Policy-Making in Kazakhstan”. In A. Heinrich and H. Pleines (eds.), pp. 102-116.
Lai, Brian and Dan Slater. 2006. “Institutions of the Offensive: Domestic Sources of Dispute Initiation in Authoritarian Regimes, 1950-1992”, American Journal of Political Science 50 (1): 113-126.
Lane, Philip and Aaron Tornell. 1996. “Power, Growth, and the Voracity Effect”, Journal of Economic Growth 1 (2): 213-241.
Laruelle, Marlene. 2012. “Discussing Neopatrimonialism and Patronal Presidentialism in the Central Asian Context”, Demokratizatsiya 20 (4): 301-324.
Le Billon, Philippe. 2001. “The Political Ecology of War: Natural Resources and Armed Conflicts”, Political Geography 20 (5): 561-584.
Le Billon, Philippe. 2003. “Buying Peace or Fuelling War: the Role of Corruption in Armed Conflicts”, Journal of International Development 15 (4), 413-426.
Ledeneva, Alena. 2013. Can Russia Modernise? Sistema, Power Networks and Informal Governance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Leftwich, Adrian. 2014. “Theorizing the State”. In P. Burnell, L. Rakner and V. Randall (eds.) Politics in the Developing World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 181-195.
214
Levi, Margaret. 1989. Of Rule and Revenue. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
LeVine, Victor T. 1986. “Leadership and Regime Changes in Perspective”. In M. G. Schatzberg and W. I. Zartman (eds.) The Political Economy of Cameroon. New York: Praeger.
Levitsky, Steven and Lucan A. Way. 2002. “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism”, Journal of Democracy 13 (2): 51-65.
Levitsky, Steven and Lucan Way. 2010. Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Levitsky, Steven and Lucan Way. 2013. “The Durability of Revolutionary Regimes”, Journal of Democracy 24 (3): 5-17.
Lewis, Peter. 1996. “From Prebendalism to Predation: The Political Economy of Decline in Nigeria”, Journal of Modern African Studies 34 (1): 79-103.
Lieberman, Evan. 2005. “Nested Analysis as a Mixed-method Strategy for Comparative Research”, American Political Science Review 99 (3): 435-452.
Lijphart, Arend. 1999. Patterns of Democracy. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lindberg, Staffan, ed. 2009. Democratization by Elections: A New Mode of Transition.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lindberg, Staffan. 2006. Democracy and Elections in Africa. Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press. Linz, Juan J. 1964. “An Authoritarian Regime: Spain.” In Erik Allardt and Yrjo
Littunen (eds.) Cleavages, Ideologies and Party Systems. Contributions to Comparative Political Sociology. Helsinki: Westermarck Society, pp. 291-341.
Linz, Juan J. 1975. “Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes”. In Fred Greenstein and Nelson Polsby (eds.) Handbook of Political Science: vol. 3: Macropolitical Theory. Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley, pp. 175-411.
Linz, Juan J. 2000. Authoritarian and Totalitarian Regimes. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Linz, Juan J. and Alfred Stepan. 1996. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Lipset, Seymour M. 1959. “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy”, American Political Science Review 53 (1): 69-105.
Lowi, Miriam. 2009. Oil Wealth and the Poverty of Politics: Algeria Compared. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Luciani, Giacomo. 1987. “Allocation vs. Production States: A Theoretical Framework.” In Hazem Beblawi and Giacomo Luciani (eds.) The Rentier State: Essays in the Political Economy of Arab Countries. London: Croom Helm, pp. 63-87.
Luciani, Giacomo. 1994. “The Oil Rent, the Fiscal Crisis of the State and Democratization.” In Ghassan Salamé (ed.) Democracy Without Democrats?: The Renewal of Politics in the Muslim World, New York: I.B. Tauris, pp. 130-155.
215
Lupu, Noam. 2010. “Who Votes for Chavismo?: Class Voting in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela”, Latin American Research Review 45 (1): 7-32.
Lust, Ellen. 2011. “Missing the Third Wave: Islam, Institutions, and Democracy in the Middle East”, Studies in Comparative International Development 46 (2): 163-190.
MacIntyre, Andrew. 2003. The Power of Institutions: Political Architecture and Governance. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Magaloni, Beatriz. 2006. Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico. Cambridge University Press.
Magaloni, Beatriz. 2008. “Credible Power Sharing and the Longevity of Authoritarian Rule”, Comparative Political Studies 41 (4/5): 715-741.
Magaloni, Beatriz and Ruth Kricheli. 2010. “Political Order and One-Party Rule”, Annual Review of Political Science 13: 123-43.
Mahdavy, Hussein. 1970. “The Patterns and Problems of Economic Development in Rentier States: The Case of Iran.” In M.A. Cook (ed.) Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East. London: Oxford University Press, pp. 428-467.
Malloy, James. 1991. “Democracy, Economic Crisis and the Problem of Governance: The Case of Bolivia”, Studies in Comparative International Development 26 (2): 37-57.
Mañe, Damian Ondo. 1994. “The Emergence of the Gulf of Guinea in the Global Economy”, IMF Working Paper 05/235, http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2005/wp05235.pdf
Mann, Michael. 1984. “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and Results”, Archives Europeennes de Sociologie 25: 185-213.
March, James and Johan Olsen. 1984. “The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life”, American Political Science Review 78 (3): 734-749.
Marshall, Monty G., Ted Robert Gurr and Keith Jaggers, 2014. “Polity IV Project: Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions 1800-2013”, Dataset Users’ Manual, Center for Systemic Peace
Mbaku, John Mukum and Joseph Takougang. 2004. “General Introduction: Biya and the Promise of a Better Society”. In John Mukum Mbaku and Joseph Takougang (eds.) The Leadership Challenge in Africa: Cameroon under Paul Biya. Trenton: Africa World Press.
Mbaku, John Mukum. 2002. “Cameroon’s Stalled Transition to Democratic Governance: Lessons for Africa’s New Democrats”, African and Asian Studies 1 (3), 125-163.
McAdam, Doug, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly. 2008. “Methods for Measuring Mechanisms of Contention”, Qualitative Sociology 31 (4): 307-331.
McCoy, Jennifer L. 1999. “Chávez and the End of ‘Partyarchy’ in Venezuela”, Journal of Democracy 10 (3): 64-77.
McCoy, Jennifer L. 2004 “From Representative to Participatory Democracy? Regime Transformation in Venezuela.” In Jennifer L. McCoy and David Myers (ed.) The
216
Unraveling of Representative Democracy in Venezuela. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 263–295.
McPherson, Charles and Stephen MacSearraigh. 2007. “Corruption in the Petroleum Sector”. In J. Edgardo Campos and Sanjay Pradhan (ed.) The Many Faces of Corruption. Washington DC: The World Bank, pp.191-220.
McSherry, Brendan. 2006. “The Political Economy of Oil in Equatorial Guinea”, African Studies Quarterly 8 (3): 23-45.
Médard, Jean-François. 1982. “The Underdeveloped State in Africa: Political Clientelism or Neo-patrimonialism?” In C. Clapham (eds.), Private Patronage and Public Power: Political Clientelism in the Modern World. London: Frances Pinter, pp. 162-89.
Mehlum, Halvor, Karl Moene and Ragnar Torvik. 2006. “Institutions and the Resource Curse”, The Economic Journal 116 (508): 1-20.
Meissner, Hannes. 2012. “The Role of the Oil Elite in Policy-Making in Azerbaijan”. In A. Heinrich and H. Pleines (eds.), pp. 131-142.
Merkel, Wolfgang. 2004. “Embedded and Defective Democracies”, Democratization 11 (5): 33-58.
Merkel, Wolfgang. 2010. “Are Dictatorships Returning? Revisiting the ‘Democratic Rollback’ Hypothesis,” Contemporary Politics 16 (1): 17-31.
Metz, Helen Chapin. ed. 1988. Iraq: A Country Study. Washington: GPO for the Library of Congress.
Mirkadirov, Rauf. 2004. “Ilham Aliyev sprovotsiroval opasnuyu “voynu ministrov”’, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, December 20.
Mitchell, John and Paul Stevens. 2008.“Ending Dependence: Hard Choices for Oil-Exporting States”, Chatham House, July.
Mommer, Bernard. 1998. “The New Governance of Venezuelan Oil”, Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, April.
Monaldi, Francisco, Rosa Amelia González, Richard Obuchi, and Michael Penfold. 2006. “Political Institutions, Policymaking Processes, and Policy Outcomes in Venezuela”, IADB paper, http://www.iadb.org/res/laresnetwork/files/pr231finaldraft.pdf
Monaldi, Francisco. 2014. “Oil and Politics in Venezuela”, Perspectives on the Americas, University of Miami, January 29, http://bit.ly/1vWBgas
Moon, Bruce E. 2009. “Long Time Coming: Prospects for Democracy in Iraq,” International Security 33 (4): 115-148.
Moore, Mick. 2004. “Revenues, State Formation, and the Quality of Governance in Developing Countries”, International Political Science Review 25 (3): 297-319.
Morrison, Kevin. 2007. “Natural Resources, Aid, and Democratization: A Best-case Scenario”, Public Choice 131 (3-4): 365-386.
Morrison, Kevin. 2009. “Oil, Nontax Revenue, and Regime Stability”, International Organization 63 (1): 107-138.
217
Munck, Gerardo. 1998. Authoritarianism and Democratization: Soldiers and Workers in Argentina, 1976-1983. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Munck, Gerardo L. and Richard Snyder. 2004. “Mapping Political Regimes: How the Concepts We Use and the Way We Measure Them Shape the World We See”. APSA Paper.
Mydans, Seth. 2003. “Letter from Asia: Free of Marx, but Now in the Grip of a Dynasty”, October 15, New York Times, from Factiva database: http://global.factiva.com/
Myers, David J. 2004. “The Normalization of Punto Fijo Democracy.” In Jennifer L. McCoy and David J. Myers (ed.) The Unraveling of Representative Democracy in Venezuela. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press.
Naim, Moises. 2001. “The Real Story behind Venezuela’s Woes”, Journal of Democracy 12 (2): 17-31.
Nathan, Andrew J. 2003. “Authoritarian Resilience”, Journal of Democracy 14 (1): 6-17.
New York Times. 2003. “Dynastic Regimes”, 25 August, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/25/opinion/dynastic-regimes.html
News.az. 2011. State Oil Fund’s assets to top $100bn - World Bank”, August 5. Norden, Deborah. 2008. “Civilian Authority without Civilian Dominance? Assessing
Venezuelan Political-Military Relations under Chávez”, Nueva Sociedad 213, 170-187.
Nordlinger, Eric. 1977. Soldiers in Politics: Military Coups and Governments. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
North, Douglass C. and Barry Weingast. 1989. “Constitution and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutional Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England”, Journal of Economic History 49 (4): 803-832.
North, Douglass. 1990. Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance. Cambridge University Press.
Norwegian Helsinki Committee. 2009. “Azerbaijan’s Dark Island: Human Rights Violations in Nakhchivan”, Report 2, Oslo.
NPR. 2011. “Dirk Vandewalle Peers Inside Gadhafi’s World”, February 28, http://www.npr.org/2011/02/28/134132726/dirk-vandewalle-peers-inside-qaddafis-world
Nyamnjoh, Francis B. 1999. “Cameroon: A Country United by Ethnic Ambition and Difference”, African Affairs 98: 101-118.
O’Donnell, Guillermo. 1973. Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism: Studies in South American Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press.
O’Donnell, Guillermo. 1979. “Tensions in the Bureaucratic-Authoritarian State and the Question of Democracy”. In David Collier (eds.) The New Authoritarianism In Latin America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 285-318.
O’Donnell, Guillermo. 1994. “Delegative Democracy”, Journal of Democracy 5 (1): 55-69.
218
O’Donnell, Guillermo. 1996. “Another Institutionalization: Latin America and Elsewhere”, Kellogg Institute Working Paper 222. Notre Dame.
OECD. 2007. Country Report - Cameroon. In African Economic Outlook. African Development Bank.
OECD. 2012. International Drivers of Corruption: A Tool for Analysis, OECD Publishing.
Okruhlik, Gwenn. 1999. “Rentier Wealth, Unruly Law, and the Rise of Opposition: The Political Economy of Oil States”, Comparative Politics 31 (3): 295-315.
Olcott, Martha Brill. 1998. “The Caspian’s False Promise”, Foreign Policy, No. 111. Olson, Mancur. 1993. “Dictatorship, Democracy and Development”, American Political
Science Review 87(3): 567-76. Olson, Mancur. 2000. Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing Communist and Capitalist
Dictatorships. New York: Basic Books. Omgba, Luc Désiré. 2009. “On the Duration of Political Power in Africa: The Role of
Oil Rents”, Comparative Political Studies 42 (3): 416-436. OSCE/ODIHR Election Observation Mission Report, Republic of Azerbaijan
Presidential Election, 15 October 2003. Oskarsson, Sven and Eric Ottosen. 2010. “Does Oil Still Hinder Democracy?” Journal
of Development Studies 46 (6): 1067-1083. Ottaway, Marina. 2003. Democracy Challenged: The Rise of Semi-Authoritarianism.
Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Pearce, Katy and Farid Guliyev. n.d. “Social Media and Political Opposition in
Azerbaijan”. Under review for: Axel Bruns et al. (ed). Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics.
Peceny, Mark, Caroline Beer and Shannon Sanchez-Terry. 2002. “Dictatorial Peace?”. American Political Science Review 96 (1): 15-26.
Penfold-Becerra, Michael. 2006. “Clientelism and Social Funds: Empirical Evidence from Chávez’s ‘Misiones’ Programs in Venezuela”, Paper, IESA, Caracas, May.
Pepinsky, Thomas B. 2009. Economic Crises and the Breakdown of Authoritarian Regimes: Indonesia and Malaysia in Comparative Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Pérez, Orlando J. 2013. “The Basis of Support for Hugo Chávez: Measuring the Determinants of Presidential Job Approval in Venezuela”, The Latin Americanist 57 (2): 59-84.
Perlmutter, Amos. 1981. Modern Authoritarianism: A Comparative Institutional Analysis. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Peuch, Jean-Christophe. 2004. “Azerbaijan: Is President Ilham Aliyev’s Power Base Wobbling?”, RFE/RL, June 11.
Pickering, Jeffrey and Emizet Kisangani. 2010. “Diversionary Despots? Comparing Autocracies’ Propensities to Use and to Benefit from Military Force”, American Journal of Political Science 54 (2): 477-493.
219
Pitcher, Anne, Mary Moran and Michael Johnston. 2009. “Rethinking Patrimonialism and Neopatrimonialism in Africa”, African Studies Review 52 (1): 125-56.
Pleines, Heiko. 2012. “The Role of Corruption in the Governance of the Oil and Gas Industry”. In A. Heinrich and H. Pleines (ed.), pp. 205-216.
Polity IV. 2008. Country Report Azerbaijan, http://www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm.
Przeworski, Adam and Henry Teune. 1970. The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry. New York: John Wiley.
Przeworski, Adam, Michael Alvarez, Jose A. Cheibub and Fernando Limongi. 2000. Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Material Well-being in the World, 1950-1990. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Purcell, Kaufman. 1973. “Decision-Making in an Authoritarian Regime: Theoretical Implications from a Mexican Case Study”, World Politics 26 (1): 28-54.
Putnam, Robert D. 1976. The Comparative Study of Political Elites. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Radnitz, S., 2012. Oil in the Family: Managing Presidential Succession in Azerbaijan. Democratization 19 (1): 60–77.
Ramírez, Cristóbal Valencia. 2005. “Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution: Who Are the Chavistas?”, Latin American Perspectives 32:79-97.
Ramsay, Kristopher W. 2011. “Revisiting the Resource Curse: Natural Disasters, the Price of Oil, and Democracy”, International Organization 65 (3): 507-529.
Rasizade, Alec. 2004. “Azerbaijan after Heydar Aliyev”, Nationalities Papers 32 (1): 137-164.
Reed, Quentin. 2010. “Regulating Conflicts of Interest in Challenging Environments: The Case of Azerbaijan”, Bergen: Chr. Michelsen Institute, U4 Issue 2.
Remmer, Karen L. 1986. “Exclusionary Democracy”, Studies in Comparative International Development 20 (4): 64-85.
Remmer, Karen L. 1989a. Military Rule in Latin America. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Remmer, Karen L. 1989b. “Neopatrimonialism: The Politics of Military Rule in Chile,
1973-1987”, Comparative Politics 21 (2): 149-70. Remmer, Karen L. and Gilbert W. Merkx. 1982. “Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism
Revisited”, Latin American Research Review 17 (2): 3-40. Reuter, Ora and Thomas Remington. 2009. “Dominant Party Regimes and the
Commitment Problem: the Case of United Russia”, Comparative Political Studies 42 (4): 501-526.
Reuters. 2011. “Analysis-Despite Azeri Protests, Egypt-style Revolt Unlikely”, March 24.
Revenue Watch. n.d. Azerbaijan Transparency Snapshot, http://tinyurl.com/d4j6655. Richter, Thomas. 2012. “The Rentier State: Relevance, Scope and Explanatory Power”.
In A. Heinrich and H. Pleines (eds.), pp. 23-34. Riggs, Fred W. 1993. “Fragility of the Third World’s Regimes”, International Social
Science Journal 45 (2): 199-243.
220
Robinson, James, Ragnar Torvik and Thierry Verdier. 2006. “Political Foundations of the Resource Curse”, Journal of Development Economics 79 (2): 447-468.
Roeder, Philip. 1993. Red Sunset: The Failure of Soviet Politics. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Roessler, Philip and Marc M. Howard. 2009. “Post-Cold War Political Regimes: When Do Elections Matter?”. In Staffan Lindberg (eds.) Democratization by Elections: A New Mode of Transition. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 101-27.
Rohozinski, Rafal. 2005. “E-Governance in Azerbaijan”, Baku: UNDP Azerbaijan. Ross, Michael L. 1999. “The Political Economy of the Resource Curse”, World Politics
51 (2): 297-322. Ross, Michael L. 2001. “Does Oil Hinder Democracy?” World Politics 53 (3): 325-361. Ross, Michael L. 2004a. “What Do We Know About Natural Resources and Civil
War?” Journal of Peace Research 41 (3): 337-356. Ross, Michael L. 2004b. “Does Taxation Lead to Representation?” British Journal of
Political Science 34 (2): 229-249. Ross, Michael L. 2006. “A Closer Look at Oil, Diamonds, and Civil War”, Annual
Review of Political Science 9: 265-300. Ross, Michael L. 2008. “Oil and the State”, Paper presented at MIT Department of
Political Science, Works in Progress series, February 29. Ross, Michael L. 2009. “Oil and Democracy Revisited.” UCLA. Unpublished
manuscript, available at http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/ross/ Ross, Michael L. 2012. The Oil Curse: How Petroleum Wealth Shapes the Development
of Nations. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Ross, Michael L. 2013. “Oil and Gas Data, 1932-2011”,
http://hdl.handle.net/1902.1/20369 Ross, Michael L. 2014. “What Have We Learned about the Resource Curse?”
Unpublished paper, UCLA. Rosser, Andrew. 2006. “The Political Economy of the Resource Curse: A Literature
Survey”. University of Sussex, IDS Working Paper 268. Roth, Guenther. 1968. “Personal Rulership, Patrimonialism, and Empire-Building in the
New States”, World Politics 20 (2): 194-206. Rowling, Rupert. 2012. “Venezuela Passes Saudis to Hold World’s Biggest Oil
Reserves”, Bloomberg, June 14. Sachs, Jeffrey D. and Andrew M. Warner. 1995. “Natural Resource Abundance and
Economic Growth”, NBER Working Paper No. 5398. Sachs, Jeffrey D. and Andrew M. Warner. 2001. “The Curse of Natural Resources”,
European Economic Review 45 (4/6): 827-838. Sakwa, Richard. 2011. The Crisis of Russian Democracy: The Dual State, Factionalism
and the Medvedev Succession. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.
221
Sala-i-Martin, Xavier and Arvind Subramanian. 2003. “Addressing the Natural Resource Curse: An Illustration from Nigeria,” IMF Working Paper WP/03/139, available at http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2003/wp03139.pdf
Sambanis, Nicolas. 2001. “Do Ethnic and Nonethnic Civil Wars Have the Same Causes? A Theoretical and Empirical Inquiry (Part I)”, Journal of Conflict Resolution 45 (3): 259-282.
Sambanis, Nicolas. 2004. “Using Case Studies to Expand Economic Models of Civil War”, Perspectives on Politics 2 (2): 259-279.
Sandbrook, Richard. 1985. The Politics of Africa’s Economic Stagnation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sartori G. 1976. Parties and Party Systems. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Sartori, Giovanni. 1991. “Comparing and Miscomparing”, Journal of Theoretical Politics 3 (3): 243-257.
Schatz, Edward. 2012. “Kinship and the State in Kazakhstan’s Political Economy”. In A. Heinrich and H. Pleines (eds.) Challenges of the Caspian Resource Boom, pp. 89-101.
Schatzberg, Michael G., and William I. Zartman, ed. 1986. The Political Economy of Cameroon. New York: Praeger.
Schedler, Andreas. 1998. “What is Democratic Consolidation?” Journal of Democracy 9 (2): 91-107.
Schedler, Andreas. 2002. “Elections Without Democracy: The Menu of Manipulation”. Journal of Democracy 13(2): 36-50.
Schedler, Andreas. 2006a. “The Logic of Electoral Authoritarianism”. In A. Schedler (eds.) Electoral Authoritarianism: The Dynamics of Unfree Competition. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, pp. 1-23.
Schedler, Andreas, ed. 2006b. Electoral Authoritarianism: The Dynamics of Unfree Competition. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Schedler, Andreas. 2009. “The New Institutionalism in the Study of Authoritarian Regimes”. APSA Toronto Meeting Paper, http://ssrn.com/abstract=1451602
Schedler, Andreas. 2011. “The Politics of Uncertainty: Sustaining and Subverting Authoritarian Regimes”. Paper presented at Jacobs University Bremen, Nov 7.
Schedler, Andreas. 2013. The Politics of Uncertainty: Sustaining and Subverting Electoral Authoritarianism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schneider, Carsten and Philippe Schmitter. 2004. “Liberalization, Transition and Consolidation: Measuring the Components of Democratization”, Democratization 11 (5): 59-90.
Seawright, Jason and John Gerring. 2008. “Case Selection Techniques in Case Study Research: A Menu of Qualitative and Quantitative Options”, Political Research Quarterly 61 (2): 294-308.
222
Shambayati, Hootan. 1994. “The Rentier State, Interest Groups, and the Paradox of Autonomy: State and Business in Turkey and Iran”, Comparative Politics 26 (3): 307-331.
Shefter, Martin. 1994. Political Parties and the State. The American Historical Experience. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Shifter, Michael. 2012. “Venezuela’s Next Inning”, Foreign Policy, October 8. Shirinov, Rashad. 2013. “Stepping into the Unlimited Phase: Ilham Aliyev’s Third
Term”, Caucasus Analytical Digest No. 55, October 24, 2-4. Sidikov, Bahodir. 2004. “New or Traditional? ‘Clans’, Regional Groupings, and State in
Post-Soviet Azerbaijan”, Berliner Osteuropa Paper, No. 21. Slater, Dan and Sofia Fenner. 2011. “State Power and Staying Power: Infrastructural
Mechanisms and Authoritarian Durability”, Journal of International Affairs 65 (1): 15-29.
Slater, Dan. 2003. “Iron Cage in an Iron Fist: Authoritarian Institutions and the Personalization of Power in Malaysia”, Comparative Politics 36 (1): 81-102.
Smith, Benjamin. 2004. “Oil Wealth and Regime Survival in the Developing World, 1960-1999”, American Journal of Political Science 48 (2): 232-246.
Smith, Benjamin. 2005. “Life of the Party: The Origins of Regime Breakdown and Persistence under Single-Party Rule”, World Politics 57 (3): 421-451.
Smith, Benjamin. 2006. “The Wrong Kind of Crisis: Why Oil Booms and Busts Rarely Lead to Authoritarian Breakdown”, Studies in Comparative International Development 40 (4): 55-76.
Smith, Benjamin. 2007. Hard Times in the Land of Plenty: Oil Politics in Iran and Indonesia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Snyder, Richard. 1992. “Explaining Transitions from Neopatrimonial Dictatorships”, Comparative Politics 24 (4): 379-99.
Snyder, Richard. 1998. “Paths out of Sultanistic Regimes: Combining Structural and Voluntarist Perspectives”. In H. E. Chehabi and J. J. Linz (eds.), pp. 47-81.
Snyder, Richard. 2006. “Beyond Electoral Authoritarianism: The Spectrum of Nondemocratic Regimes”. In A. Schedler (eds.), pp. 219-31.
Snyder, Richard and James Mahoney. 1999. “The Missing Variable: Institutions and the Study of Regime Change”, Comparative Politics 32 (1): 103-22.
Soares de Oliveira, Ricardo. 2006. “Context, Path Dependency and Oil-Based Development in the Gulf of Guinea”. In Michael Dauderstädt and Arne Schildberg (eds.) Dead Ends of Transition: Rentier Economies and Protectorates. Frankfurt, New York: Campus Verlag, pp. 71-84.
Soares de Oliveira, Ricardo. 2007. Oil and Politics in the Gulf of Guinea. Hurst & Co/New York: Columbia University Press.
SOFAZ Statute. 2000. Approved by the Decree of the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan No. 434, December 29, http://www.oilfund.az/uploads/status.pdf.
223
Soifer, Hillel and Matthias vom Hau, 2008. “Unpacking the Strength of the State: The Utility of State Infrastructural Power”, Studies in Comparative International Development 43(3-4): 219-230.
Stepan, Alfred and Juan J. Linz. 2013. “Democratization Theory and the ‘Arab Spring,’” Journal of Democracy 24: 26-28.
Stepan, Alfred, Juan J. Linz, and Juli F. Minoves. 2014. “Democratic Parliamentary Monarchies”, Journal of Democracy 25 (2): 35-51.
Stepan, Alfred. 1971. The Military in Politics: Changing Patterns in Brazil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Subramanian, Shankar. 1994. “The Oil Boom and After: Structural Adjustment in Cameroon”. Cornell Food and Nutrition Policy Program, http://www.cfnpp.cornell.edu/images/wp67.pdf
Sultanova, Shahla. 2014. “Challenging the Aliyev Regime: Political Opposition in Azerbaijan”, Demokratizatsiya 22 (1): 15-37.
Svolik, Milan. 2009. “Power Sharing and Leadership Dynamics in Authoritarian Regimes”, American Journal of Political Science 53 (2): 477-494.
Swietochowski, Tadeusz. 1999. “Azerbaijan: Perspectives from the Crossroads”, Central Asian Survey 18 (4): 419-434.
Sylvia, Ronald D., and Constantine P. Danopoulos. 2003. “The Chávez Phenomenon: Political Change in Venezuela”, Third World Quarterly 24 (1): 63-76.
Takougang, Joseph, and Milton Krieger. 1998. African State and Society in the 1990s Cameroon’s Political Crossroads. Boulder: Westview Press.
Takougang, Joseph. 2003. “The 2002 Legislative Election in Cameroon: A Retrospective on Cameroon’s Stalled Democracy Movement”, Journal of Modern African Studies 41 (3): 421-435.
Takougang, Joseph. 2004a. “The Nature of Politics in Cameroon”. In John Mbaku and Joseph Takougang (eds.) The Leadership Challenge in Africa: Cameroon under Paul Biya. Trenton: Africa World Press, pp. 67-92.
Takougang, Joseph. 2004b. “Demise of Biya’s New Deal in Cameroon, 1987-1992”. In John Mbaku and Joseph Takougang (eds.) The Leadership Challenge in Africa: Cameroon under Paul Biya. Trenton: Africa World Press, pp. 95-121.
Tande, Dibussi. 2009. “Years ago… on the 1984 Coup Attempt”, Scribbles from the Den (blog), April 9, www.dibussi.com/2009/04/25-years-ago-captain-guerandi-mbara-in-his-own-words.html
Tande, Dibussi. 2012. “Against all odds, the Biya regime clocks 30…”, Scribbles from the Den (blog), November 6, http://www.dibussi.com/2012/11/against-all-odds-the-biya-regime-clocks-30.html
Tarrow, Sidney. 2007. “Inside Insurgencies: Politics and Violence in an Age of Civil War”, Perspectives on Politics 5 (3): 587-600.
Theobald, Robin. 1982. “Research Note: Patrimonialism”, World Politics 34 (4): 548-559.
Tinker-Salas, Miguel. 2013. “Follow the Oil”, New York Times, January 4.
224
Treisman, Daniel. 2007. “Putin’s Silovarchs”, Orbis, Winter, 141-153. Treisman, Daniel. 2010. “Rethinking Russia: Is Russia Cursed by Oil?” Journal of
International Affairs 63 (2): 85-102. Trinkunas, Harold. 2002. “The Crisis in Venezuelan Civil-Military Relations: From
Punto Fijo to the Fifth Republic”, Latin American Research Review 37 (1): 41-76. Tripp, Charles. 2003. “How Saddam Rules Iraq”. BBC News, February 10. Tsebelis, George. 2002. Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press. Tsui, Kevin K. 2011. “More Oil, Less Democracy? Evidence from Worldwide Crude
Oil Discoveries”, The Economic Journal 121 (551): 89-115. Tucker, Robert C.1961. “Towards a Comparative Politics of Movement-Regimes”,
American Political Science Review 55 (2): 281-289. Tullock, Gordon. 1987. Autocracy. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Ulfelder, Jay. 2005. “Contentious Collective Action and the Breakdown of
Authoritarian Regimes”, International Political Science Review 26 (3): 311-334. Ulfelder, Jay. 2007. “Natural Resource Wealth and the Survival of Autocracies”,
Comparative Political Studies 40 (8): 995-1018. USAID. 1993. Cameroon Concept Paper, Washington D.C. August,
http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/pnaca867.pdf USAID. 2005. Azerbaijan Civil Society Sector Assessment Report, July 11,
http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PNADD277.pdf. Valiyev, Anar. 2006. “Parliamentary Elections in Azerbaijan: A Failed Revolution”,
Problems of Post-Communism 53 (3): 17-35. Van de Walle, Nicolas. 1993. “The Politics of Nonreform in Cameroon”. In T. Callaghy
and J. Ravenhill (eds.) Hemmed In: Responses to Africa’s Economic Decline. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 357-397.
Van de Walle, Nicolas. 1994. “Neopartimonialism and Democracy in Africa, with an Illustration from Cameroon”. In Jennifer Widner (eds.) Economic and Political Liberalization in Sub-Saharan Africa. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 129-157.
Van de Walle, Nicolas. 2001. African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis, 1979-1999. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Van de Walle, Nicolas. 2002. “Africa’s Range of Regimes”, Journal of Democracy 13 (2): 66–80.
Van de Walle, Nicolas. 2007. “The Path from Neopatrimonialism: Democracy and Clientelism in Africa Today”, Working Paper No. 3-07. Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, Cornell University.
Van der Ploeg, Federick. 2010. “Why Do Many Resource-rich Countries Have Negative Saving? Anticipation of Better Times or Rapacious Rent Seeking”, Resource and Energy Economics 32: 28-44.
Vandewalle, Dirk. 1998. Libya Since Independence: Oil and State-Building. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
225
Wacziarg, Romain. 2012. “The First Law of Petropolitics”, Economica 79 (316): 641-657.
Waldner, David. 2003. “States, Markets, and Development: What We Know – and Do Not Know – About the Political Economy of the Modern Middle East”. Unpublished paper, http://people.virginia.edu/~daw4h/articles.html
Wantchekon, Leonard. 2002. “Why Do Resource Dependent Countries Have Authoritarian Governments?” Journal of African Finance and Economic Development 2: 57-77.
Weber, Max. 1978[1922]. Economy and Society. An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Werger, Charlotte. 2009. “The Effect of Oil and Diamonds on Democracy”, OxCarre Research Paper 30.
Weyland, Kurt. 2001. “Will Chávez Lose his Luster”, Foreign Affairs 80 (6): 73-87. Weyland, Kurt. 2003. “Economic Voting Reconsidered: Crisis and Charisma in the
Election of Hugo Chávez”, Comparative Political Studies 36 (7): 822-848. Weyland, Kurt. 2008. “Toward a New Theory of Institutional Change”, World Politics
60 (2): 281-314. Weyland, Kurt. 2013. “Why Latin America is Becoming Less Democratic”, The
Atlantic, July 15. Wheatley, Jonathan and Christopher Zürcher. 2008. “On the Origin and Consolidation
of Hybrid Regimes: The State of Democracy in the Caucasus”, Taiwan Journal of Democracy 4 (1): 1-31.
Wiens, David, Paul Poast, and William Roberts Clark. 2014. “The Political Resource Curse: An Empirical Re-Evaluation”, Political Research Quarterly, doi: 10.1177/1065912914543836
Wiens, David. 2014. “Natural Resources and Institutional Development”, Journal of Theoretical Politics 26 (2): 197-221.
Wintrobe, Ronald. 1990. “The Tinpot and the Totalitarian: An Economic Theory of Dictatorship”, American Political Science Review 84 (3): 849-872.
Wintrobe, Ronald. 1998. The Political Economy of Dictatorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
World Bank. 1993. Azerbaijan Energy Sector Review, Report No. 12061-AZ, December 27.
World Bank. 1995. Cameroon Diversity, Growth, and Poverty Reduction, Report No. 13167-CM, http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/1995/04/697479/cameroon-diversity-growth-poverty-reduction
World Bank. 2000. “Anticorruption in Transition - A Contribution to the Policy Debate”, September, Washington, DC.
World Bank. 2003. “Azerbaijan - Building Competitiveness”, Report No. 25818-AZ, November 20.
226
World Bank. 2005. “Azerbaijan - Issues and Options Associated with Energy Sector Reform”, Report No. 32371-AZ, March 31.
World Bank. 2009. “Azerbaijan Country Economic Memorandum: A New Silk Road: Export-led Diversification”, Report No. 44365-AZ, December 23.
World Bank. various years. World Development Indicators. The World Bank: Washington, DC.
Wright, Joseph. 2008. “Do Authoritarian Institutions Constrain? How Legislatures Affect Economic Growth and Investment”, American Journal of Political Science 52 (2): 322-343.
Wright, Joseph and Abel Escribà-Folch. 2012. “Authoritarian Institutions and Regime Survival: Transitions to Democracy and Subsequent Autocracies”, British Journal of Political Science 42 (2): 283-309.
Wright, Joseph, Erica Frantz, and Barbara Geddes. 2012. “Oil and Autocratic Regime Survival”, British Journal of Political Science, http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0007123413000252
Yates, Douglas A. 1996. The Rentier State in Africa: Oil Rent Dependency and Neocolonialism in the Republic of Gabon. Trenton: Africa World Press.
Yates, Douglas A. 2005. “Neo-‘Petro-monialism’ and the Rentier State in Gabon”. In Matthias Basedau and Andreas Mehler (ed.) Resource Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa. Institute of African Affairs, Hamburg African Studies 14, pp. 173-190.
Yom, Sean L. 2011. “Oil, Coalitions, and Regime Durability: The Origins and Persistence of Popular Rentierism in Kuwait”, Studies in Comparative International Development 46: 217-241.
Young, Crawford. 1999. “Resurrecting Sultanism”, Journal of Democracy 10 (3): 165-168.