A new article in Perspectives on Politics by Associate Professor David Waldner and University of Florida's Benjamin Smith is available online now. In "Survivorship Bias in Comparative Politics: Endogenous Sovereignty and the Resource Curse," the authors argue that selection bias has skewed scholars' understanding of how oil and other natural resources influence state formation and survival. "Using rudimentary graph theory," the authors "present survivorship bias as a form of collider bias, which is related to but distinct from selection on the dependent variable. Because collider bias is always relative to a specific causal model, we present a causal model of post-colonial sovereignty on the Arabian Peninsula, show that it implies survivorship bias in the form of false positives with respect to the political resource curse, and provide historical evidence confirming that the model correctly depicts the creation of sovereign countries on the Arabian Peninsula but not elsewhere."

Read the full article here.