The Missing Dimension of the Political Resource Curse Debate

Given the methodological sophistication of the debate over the “political resource curse”—the purported negative relationship between natural resource wealth (in particular oil wealth) and democracy—it is surprising that scholars have not paid more attention to the basic statistical issue of how to deal with missing data. This article highlights the problems caused by the most common strategy for analyzing missing data in the political resource curse literature—listwise deletion—and investigates how addressing such problems through the best-practice technique of multiple imputation affects empirical results. I find that multiple imputation causes the results of a number of influential recent studies to converge on a key common finding: A political resource curse does exist, but only since the widespread nationalization of petroleum industries in the 1970s. This striking finding suggests that much of the controversy over the political resource curse has been caused by a neglect of missing-data issues.