2
rentier state flow from the state’s access to externally obtained revenues from the sale of
oil” (2004, 233, emphasis added). For one group of scholars (e.g. Acemoglu, et al. 2004;
Bazresch and Levy 1991; Chaudhry 1997; Crystal 1989; Entelis 1976; Karl 1997;
Vandewalle 1998), the key issue is that oil revenues allow governments to “buy off
political consensus” (Beblawi and Luciani 1987a, 7). By this argument, the soft budget
constraints that oil revenues provide enable governments to reduce the pressures for
regime change (Anderson 1995; Luciani 1987). A second group of scholars (e.g. Bellin
1994; Chaudhry 1994; Clark 1997; Moore 1976; Ross 2001; Shambayati 1994; Skocpol
1982) have pointed to the association of oil revenues with repression of various social
groups and citizens. The result of such repression is the same as buying off those groups:
less pressure for regime change.
This paper takes off from two points that can be made with regard to this
literature. First, the fact that two quite different causal mechanisms—cooptation and
repression—have been offered to explain oil’s relationship with authoritarianism
indicates that there is possibly nothing inherent in these resources that makes regimes act
in certain ways. And if this is the case, then it may make far more sense to think of these
types of resources as simply revenue entering a particular political economy, rather than
as a resource with “antidemocratic properties” (Ross 2001, 325). That they are used in
authoritarian regimes for repression may be nothing more than a reflection of those
regimes’ preferences over the use of state finances. Presumably democratic regimes
would use these resources in a different way, but we have no theories to account for how.
Second, if the key mechanism at work here is the state’s access to externally
obtained resources, we should not expect that oil revenues are particularly unique (though
Convention