Oil and Revolutionary Regimes: A Toxic Mix Jeff Colgan November 2008 International Political Economy Society Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA

Empirical Puzzle Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDS), annual rate per state, : –Petrostates: 0.84 MIDS / year –Non-petrostates: 0.47 MIDS / year What explains this discrepancy?

Theoretical argument in a nutshell Domestic Revolution International Conflict Domestic Revolution LOTS of International 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  ConflictOil 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, , 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 Results Table 3: International Disputes of Revolutionary States – Regression analysis

Empirical Results Zoom of Table 3: International Disputes of Revolutionary States

Empirical Results Figure 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 of International Conflict Oil +

Thanks

Appendix

Empirical Results Table 5: Does Oil Cause Revolutionary Regimes?

Appendix A