When Does Oil Harm Child Mortality?

• Date: 01 September 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912920931201
• Published date: 01 September 2021
• Author: Nisha Bellinger,Matthew D. Fails
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912920931201

Political Research Quarterly

2021, Vol. 74(3) 645 –657

© 2020 University of Utah

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/1065912920931201

journals.sagepub.com/home/prq

Article

Introduction

A growing body of research suggests that natural

resource wealth reduces leaders’ incentives to invest in

the well-being of citizens and harms health outcomes

(Chang and Wei 2017; de Soysa and Gizelis 2013; Kim

and Lin 2017; Pendergast, Clarke, and Van Kooten 2011;

Stretesky, Long, and Lynch 2017; Wigley 2017). By

sharp contrast, other scholars suggest that natural

resources provide critical funds for social spending and

show that resource abundance is associated with

improved population health metrics (Cotet and Tsui

2013; El Anshasy and Katsaiti 2015; Stijns 2006).

What explains these contradictory findings? We locate

the problem in scholars’ tendency to explore whether

there is a general relationship between resource wealth

(and oil in particular) and health outcomes. By contrast,

we focus on why similarly resource-abundant states dem-

onstrate such vast differences in health outcomes. We

focus on nondemocratic regimes and employ a mixed-

methods analysis to show that oil income is only harmful

for child mortality when leaders have short time horizons.

Leaders whose hold on power is tenuous are more likely

to use oil rents to shore up their political power, either

through patronage or other private goods that crowd out

essential public good investments which could improve

health outcomes.

Our theoretical argument and empirical findings

reflect two related trends in the broader literature on the

“resource curse.” First, consistent with recent work

including Smith (2007), Luong and Weinthal (2010),

Torvik (2009), Dunning (2008), and Mahdavi (2019), we

argue that the impact of oil wealth varies across institu-

tional settings. Second, we shift from asking whether oil

has a particular effect to asking why these effects materi-

alize. This trend has been most evident in the studies

linking oil abundance to the stability of authoritarian

rule. For instance, recent studies emphasize the use of oil

wealth to prevent coups (Wright, Frantz, and Geddes

2015), reduce protests through repression (Girod,

Stewart, and Walters 2018), subsidize consumer goods in

an effort to impede political challengers (Fails 2019), or

reduce citizens’ incentives to exercise government over-

sight (Paler 2013), to name a few.

Our paper also contributes to the literatures on the

political determinants of human development, which

tends to emphasize broad differences between democratic

and nondemocratic regime types (Kudamatsu 2012; Lake

and Baum 2001; Wigley and Akkoyunlu-Wigley 2011b).

However, recent empirical evidence suggests that there is

considerable variation within democracies according to

differences in institutional structures or the length of time

931201PRQXXX10.1177/1065912920931201Political Research QuarterlyBellinger and Fails

research-article2020

1Boise State University, ID, USA

2Oakland University, Rochester, MI, USA

Corresponding Author:

Nisha Bellinger, School of Public Service, Boise State University,

Environmental Research Building 3141, 1900 University Drive, Boise,

ID 83725-1935, USA.

Email: nishabellinger@boisestate.edu

When Does Oil Harm Child Mortality?

Nisha Bellinger1 and Matthew D. Fails2

Abstract

When is oil a curse for health outcomes? This paper addresses the question by analyzing the effect of oil wealth

on child mortality rates in nondemocratic countries. We argue that oil is particularly likely to harm child mortality

when leaders have short time horizons. Such leaders are more likely to use oil revenues to finance private goods and

patronage which builds their support coalition at the expense of public goods that benefit the broader population. We

test this argument using panel regression and a global sample of nondemocratic regimes, supplemented with a case

study of Cameroon. Results from both empirical approaches are consistent with our argument. These findings identify

some specific conditions under which oil can be detrimental to child mortality, and thus explain some of the variation

in health outcomes across oil-producing states.

Keywords

oil, child mortality, time horizons, nondemocracy, resource curse