Cheated of What? Resource Grievance Detached from Resource Dependence
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.68570/w5d0hh68Keywords:
resource curse, extractive industries, natural resource governance, political attitudes, Afrobarometer, AfricaAbstract
Purpose. The political resource curse holds that extraction concentrates wealth, insulates rulers and excludes citizens. It follows that citizens of resource-dependent states should feel more excluded from resource wealth than citizens of states with little to extract. This article tests that expectation directly on African publics.
Methods. Afrobarometer Round 9, covering 39 countries and 53,444 respondents, is merged with World Bank estimates of total natural resource rents as a share of GDP. Four extraction items are analysed at the individual level with standard errors clustered by country, and again on the 39 country means.
Findings. Citizens of resource-dependent states do not feel more excluded. 81.2 percent say extraction needs more regulation, 40.0 percent deny that citizens have any voice in extraction decisions, and 48.4 percent deny that their community receives a fair share. None of these is related to how much a country actually extracts: the country-level correlation between log resource rents and perceived fair share is 0.016, and the individual-level coefficient is –0.014 with a confidence interval excluding anything beyond four percentage points. What predicts perceived exclusion is perceived corruption, education and urban residence, not deprivation and not rents.
Implications. The grievance behaves like the fiscal grievance documented elsewhere: those who feel most excluded disapprove of incumbents more and protest, contact officials and trust elections less. Extraction grievance in Africa is a disposition toward the state rather than a response to extraction.
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