Oil and Revolutionary Regimes:

A Toxic Mix

Jeff ColganNovember 2008

International Political Economy SocietyAnnual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA

Empirical Puzzle

• Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDS), annual rate per state, 1965-2001:

– Petrostates: 0.84 MIDS / year– Non-petrostates: 0.47 MIDS / year

• What explains this discrepancy?

Theoretical argument in a nutshell

Domestic Revolution

InternationalConflict

Domestic Revolution

LOTS ofInternational

Conflict

Oil+

• Domestic revolution: a movement or regime that transforms the existing social, political, and economic relationships of the state

Political Economy of Oil

• Democracy: – Ross, 2001, 2006, 2008 – Herb, 2005; Haber and Menaldo, 2007 – Colgan (working paper)

• Regime Behavior and Stability – Karl, 1997 – Chaudry, 1997– Smith, 2004

• Civil Wars– Fearon and Laitin, 2003; Collier and Hoeffler, 2000; Smith

2004

• New effect: international conflict– But only for revolutionary petrostates

Causal mechanisms

1. Weakening institutions that constrain executive

Revolution Conflict Oil exacerbates by …

2. Creating incentives for conflict via nationalistic fervor and radicalism

3. Causing rivals to perceive a “window of opportunity” for conquest

1. Providing resources to leader to personalize power and further weaken institutions

2. Creating lasting national grievances due to past foreign intervention in oil industry

3. Making the chance of conquest more profitable

New Dataset: Revolutionary Regimes

• No widely accepted dataset, or even definition, of revolutions existed

• Thus I created a new dataset– 170 countries, 1945-2001, coded

dichotomously– “Regime” = continuous period of time

under the same leadership– Regime is coded revolutionary if two

criteria are met

Criteria for Revolutionary Regimes

• Leader must have come to power by force• Major social, political, economic

transformation in at least 3 of 7 dimensions:– Selection/Role of Political Executive– Relationship of Church and State– Structure of Property Ownership– Official State Ideology– Rights/Role of Women– Official Name of State– Leadership by a Revolutionary Command Council

• More details available in the codebook

Empirical Methodology• Panel Poisson regression analysis • Principal DV: count of Aggressor-MIDS

– Data drawn from COW dataset– COW “Revisionist” variable used to divide MIDS into

two categories: Aggressor-MIDS and Defender-MIDS • Unit of analysis = state-year • Petrostates were identified dichotomously

– Identified by oil export revenue >10% of GDP– 5 marginal cases eliminated, leaving 28 petrostates

(see Appendix A for list of state-years)– Other operationalizations used for robustness

checks• State fixed-effects used in some models

Empirical Results

Table 2: International Disputes of Revolutionary Regimes

Empirical ResultsTable 3: International Disputes of Revolutionary States – Regression analysis

Empirical Results

Zoom of Table 3: International Disputes of Revolutionary States

Empirical ResultsFigure 2: Effect of the Combination of Oil and Revolutionary Regimes on MIDS

Note: All other variables set to their mean values

Empirical Results

Table 4:Robustness Checks

Conclusion

• Contributions:– Deepens and challenges conventional wisdom on oil and

war– Provides a fresh look at the relationship between

revolution and war: • Differs theoretically from past accounts• Offers new evidence.

– Introduces a new large-N dataset on revolutionary regimes that opens up new research avenues

Domestic Revolution

LOTS ofInternational

Conflict

Oil+

Thanks

Appendix

Empirical Results

Table 5:Does Oil Cause RevolutionaryRegimes?

Appendix A