Oil and democracy

Nate Silver has some interesting thoughts on the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions, noting that nations without large oil reserves (especially in the Middle East) tend more towards democracies than their neighboring petro-dictatorships.

Michael Ross, a political science professor at U.C.L.A. who is among the foremost proponents of the hypothesis, has concluded that democratic transitions are 50 percent more likely in oil-poor states than in oil rich ones. That fact alone is certainly not sufficient to explain why Tunisia has undergone regime change, or why Egypt is on the brink of it--but it does suggest that the underlying probabilities were greater in those countries than for some of their regional neighbors.

If the ramifications of this hypothesis are carried to fruition, perhaps we can expect increasing democratic activity even in petro-states like Saudi Arabia as reserves fall and oil revenues suffer. Talk about decentralized power...