Do Natural Resources Always Promote Authoritarianism?

Looking at most of the Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and African countries, people tend to claim that natural resource production promotes authoritarianism. These natural resources can be energy related like oil and natural gas or valuables like gold and diamond. Through forming rentier ties, using the resource money to buy tools for repressing the population, the leaders tend to keep their population under control, uneducated, and without political rights.


Though this is not the case with all resource producing countries. Venezuela, especially before Chavez, Bostwana, Chile, Norway... These are some of the countries that we see at least a Schumpeterian democracy. Are they democratize despite resource production, or are they democratic because of it. Thad Dunning answers that question in a convincing manner, using multiple methods, like game theory, statistical tools, case studies.
A good read...

By the way, the answer is "because of natural resource production",  at least for Dunning.