ABSTRACT
This chapter tests the functional aspects of the model by studying the impact of resource dependency and assessing how such ‘resource curses’ affect the model in its various stages. After a short but thorough survey of the relevant literature on the resources, their location, nature, lootability and varying rents, this chapter compilates the effects of resource curses in three areas, corresponding with the model’s legitimacy gap, capacity gap and security gap (cf. C. Call). The cases of Nigeria and Niger are instrumentalized to test the interrelation of personalist regime behavior with high rents (Nigeria and its oil curse) and low rents (Niger and its struggling uranium and oil sectors). The chapter concludes that resource curses can be present in non-personalist autocracies, but that the nature of the institutions determines how resource abundance is used – as a blessing or a curse. The very nature of personalism makes such curses more pronounced than in other regime types and resource dependency is by all accounts functional for the model, meaning it strengthens the existing causal dynamics of personalist rule.
