Thad Dunning is Assistant Professor of Political Science and a research fellow at Yale's Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies as well as the Institution for Social and Policy Studies. He studies comparative politics, political economy, international relations, and methodology. His book, Crude Democracy: Natural Resource Wealth and Political Regimes, studies the democratic and authoritarian effects of natural resource wealth. The dissertation on which the book is based won the Mancur Olson Prize of the Political Economy Section of the American Political Science Association, for the best dissertation completed in the previous two years. Dunning conducts field research in Latin America and Africa and has written on a range of methodological topics, including econometric corrections for selection effects and the use of natural experiments in the social sciences.

This book challenges the conventional wisdom that natural resource wealth promotes autocracy. Oil and other forms of mineral wealth can promote both authoritarianism and democracy, the book argues, but they do so through different mechanisms; an understanding of these different mechanisms can help elucidate when either the authoritarian or democratic effects of resource wealth will be relatively strong. Exploiting game-theoretic tools and statistical modeling as well as detailed country case studies and drawing on fieldwork in Latin America and Africa, this book builds and tests a theory that explains political variation across resource-rich states. It will be read by scholars studying the political effects of natural resource wealth in many regions, as well as by those interested in the emergence and persistence of democratic regimes.