The wrong kind of crisis: Why oil booms and busts rarely lead to authoritarian breakdown

Economic crisis has been a central catalyst to Third Wave democratic transitions by contributing to authoritarian breakdown, yet crises in oil-exporting states have generally failed to catalyze such breakdowns, which are a crucial precondition to democratization. This article argues that oil wealth produces two distinct political trajectories, depending on its timing relative to the onset of late development. The dominant trajectory in the oil-exporting world is durable authoritarianism which has forestalled all but a few regime collapses. And, when the alternate trajectory produces vulnerable authoritarianism, oil-catalyzed authoritarian breakdown tends to generate new authoritarian regimes. I use case materials from Iran and Indonesia during the 1960s and 1970s to illustrate the two oil-based trajectories, and I conduct a broader test of the theory against data for 21 oil-exporting, developing countries, which provides suggestive support for a two-path theory of oil-based aturhoritarian persistence. Benjamin Smith is an assistant professor of political science and Asian studies at the University of Florida. His first book,Hard Times in the Land of Plenty: Oil, Opposition, and Late Development, is under contract with Cornell University Press. Other work has appeared in theAmerican Journal of Political Science, World Politics, and theJournal of International Affairs. He is currently at work on a book-length study of durable authoritarianism with Jason Brownlee (University of Texas-Austin) and on a study of the conditions under which democracy can consolidate in oil-rich countries with Joseph Kraus (University of Florida). Thanks to Jason Brownlee, Sam Huntington, Joel Migdal, Pete Moore, Jon Pevehouse, Susan Pharr, Dan Slater, David Waldner, Patricia Woods, participants in the Sawyer Seminar in comparative politics at Harvard University; participants in the “Transforming Authoritarian Rentier Economies and Protectorates” seminar at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Bonn; and three anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this article.