Oil Discoveries and Political Windfalls

• In Event: The Micro-level Politics of the Resource Curse

Abstract

Incumbent political leaders often seek to spend oil revenues strategically to prolong their political survival. Few studies to date, however, have examined the strategic considerations surrounding the geographic targeting of oil benefits at the subnational level. Integrating research on the resource curse and on distributive politics, we theorize how the effects of oil on incumbent support vary depending on whether oil is discovered in core, swing, or opposition localities. While oil discoveries might induce greater allocations to oil-rich core constituencies to buy turnout or to opposition constituencies to forestall conflict, we predict that leaders seeking to maximize their political support will target benefits to oil-rich swing localities. Using rich individual and locality-level data and a triple difference design in Uganda, we show that the effect of an oil discovery indeed resulted in relatively bigger increases in incumbent support in oil-rich swing constituencies. We provide further evidence that this was due to greater increases in perceived benefits, consistent with credible promises of future targeted benefits. These findings have important implications for understanding the subnational origins of the political resource curse.

Authors

• Laura B. Paler, University of Pittsburgh

• Jeremy Springman, University of Pennsylvania

• Guy Grossman, University of Pennsylvania

• Jan Henryk Pierskalla, Ohio State University