Relationships Between Oil and Democracy in the African Oil States : A Quantitative Resource Curse Study from a Postcolonial Perspective

This thesis adopts a theory-building approach that brings transnational oil companies into the quantitative research on the resource curse. It asks: what relationships are there between oil abundance and foreign control in oil extraction on the one hand, and democracy on the other, in oil-producing African states? To address this question, the study uses panel data from almost all of Africa’s oil- and gas-producing countries over the period 2014–2023. It employs multivariate regression models with interaction terms and uses levels of liberal democracy and clientelism as dependent variables. The independent variables are hydrocarbon abundance and the degree of foreign control in hydrocarbon extraction. The findings qualify the traditional oil- impedes-democracy argument but also suggest that associations between hydrocarbons and democracy are conditional rather than uniform. Additionally, the results provide preliminary indications of a neocolonial rentier effect, whereby foreign operational control functions as a conditional factor in the relationship between hydrocarbon abundance and clientelism. The main contributions of the thesis are a novel theoretical framework—the neocolonial resource curse theory—as well as an operationalisation of neocolonial extractivism through a newly constructed measure of foreign control in hydrocarbon extraction.