Natural resource governance: does social media matter?

In this paper, we study the relationship between communication and "transparency of information" and governance by exploring the link between social media and natural resource governance. Using a cross-country analysis, we document a robust and statistically significant positive relationship between Facebook penetration (a proxy for social media) and natural resource governance. It follows that countries with higher social media levels enjoy natural resource governance of better quality than countries with low levels of social media. The positive effect of social media is robust to controlling for other determinants of institutional quality, additional controls, and outliers, inter alia.