A Boom in Fortunes: How the Presence of Oil Affects Republican Support in North Dakota

Abstract

In this paper, we aim to assess how the presence of oil rigs and the associated economic spillovers affect political support for the business- friendly party assumed to be the Republicans for our purposes. We analyse the state of North Dakota from 2000-2016 due to its oil boom beginning in 2006, taking the support of the Republican presidential candidate by county, and the presence of oil to be the basic empirical strategy. The specific strategy we used was conducting a difference-in-difference (diff-in-diff) analysis comparing the western half of the state where the oil rigs are located to the eastern half of the state where there are no oil rigs. We find that oil rigs and their presence do have a significant result on the support for Republican presidential candidates in elections post-2008. We conducted a minor extension where we conducted analysis on whether or not the presence of oil spills counteracts the effect experienced by the spill. We find that this result is not as significant and large in magnitude.