Buying Quiescence: How Reliance on Resource Revenues Influences Citizens’ Demand for Democracy

Abstract

A central debate has emerged over whether dependence on natural resources weakens citizens’ incentives to pressure governments to democratize. The overarching research question of this dissertation is: How and under what conditions does resource reliance influence citizens’ demand for democracy? I address this question using country- and individual-level evidence. I conduct a country-level analysis of the relationship between resource wealth and demand for democratic institutions—such as competitive elections, judicial independence, legislatures, and civil liberties. I then conduct survey experiments in Peru and Nigeria to identify the conditions under which revenue information shapes citizens’ demand for democracy. These experiments focus on three conditions: ownership of revenue, anti-corruption initiatives, and revenue transparency under perceived inequality. Across four studies, I demonstrate that: (1) reliance on natural resource revenues has a small but positive effect on democratic protest globally and in the Middle East and North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa; (2) perceived ownership is marginally stronger for local taxes than resource rents and is correlated with accountability demands, suggesting it underpins the taxation–accountability relationship; however, information treatments designed to increase perceived ownership over taxes do not increase accountability; instead, they shape the type of demands citizens make—increasing preferences for private over public goods; (3) information on anti-corruption initiatives involving public funds slightly increases willingness to monitor government spending, participate in budgetary decisions, and vote in elections, but does not increase willingness to protest, vote for or against incumbents, shift toward programmatic demands, or incur participation costs; and (4) perceived wealth concentration moderates the effect of oil revenue information on willingness to demand accountability — more positively among those with high perceived wealth concentration — though without a mobilizing effect. Other examined forms of perceived inequality do not moderate this relationship, and no significant moderating effects emerge for tax revenue information. In summary, this dissertation shows that providing revenue information to citizens is important but not sufficient to generate accountability pressures, particularly in windfall-dependent contexts. It also highlights the difficulty of using information treatments to strengthen ownership over resource revenues as a strategy for enhancing accountability. Although the tax ownership treatment does not translate into stronger accountability pressures, it shifts demands toward particularistic benefits over public goods. A further key finding is that revenue information influences expressive demands for accountability when citizens are informed about anti-corruption efforts and perceive high wealth concentration among elites.