Ethnically asymmetric political representation and the provision of public goods: theory and evidence from Ethiopia

Abstract

While the salience of ethnicity as a factor in African politics has been documented in the literature, less is known about its impacts on economic development. Using data from Ethiopia, we study the developmental impacts of ethnically asymmetric political representation. We find that enhanced political representation improves access to public goods. Moreover, regional disparities of access to public goods due to improved political representation are more pronounced in rural than in urban areas. To complement our empirical analysis, we construct a theoretical model that suggests potential mechanisms through which public goods provision favors regions with better political representation.

Appendices

Appendix

Appendix A. Brief political background of modern Ethiopia

Ethiopia’s modern political history overlaps with the ‘Scramble for Africa’ by the European colonial powers in the late 19th century. Emperor Menelik the II (1889–1913) expanded his kingdom into what is today the southern half of the country, conquering the Oromo (the demographic majority of the country), the Somali and dozens of other ethnic groups currently making up Ethiopia (Zewde 2002). Menelik identified himself as an Amhara, a historically powerful group whose kings ruled over Abyssinia (Northern Ethiopia) for centuries, outmaneuvering the other key Abyssinian group, the Tegaru (Young 1998). With the exceptions of the Zagwe dynasty between about 900 and 1285, the Yeju Oromo effectively governing Abyssinia for about seventy years until 1853 and King Yohannes of Tigray wresting power from the Amhara kings for a little over a dozen years before Menelik assumed power, political life in Abyssinia and Ethiopia was dominated by the Amhara for centuries until the early 1990s (Bekele et al. 2016)).

Menelik II—who is largely credited with (and blamed for) giving Ethiopia its current shape (and multidimensional problems)—collaborated with the British, the French and the Italians to wrest power from the then Tegaru king, King Yohannes IV. This had been the source of a long-lasting resentment by the Tegaru for the next nearly 100 years, until the so-called Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF)—assisted heavily by the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF)—defeated the Ethiopian army in 1991 and installed itself—for all intents and purposes—as the government in Ethiopia, controlling key institutions including the defense and security establishments (Jenny 1998).

To extend their political longevity in Addis Ababa, the leaders of TPLF came up with mechanisms that would enable them to neutralize potentially significant rivalry from the Oromo and the Amhara, with both groups posing different but serious challenges that could prevent the TPLF from capturing the Ethiopian state for an extended period of time. The Amhara elites, in particular, who saw themselves as the creators and guardians of the Ethiopian state, would not tolerate playing second fiddle to the Tegaru when it comes to deciding the affairs of the country. The historically disenfranchised Oromo posed a different challenge in the form of the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), which pushed for the rights to self-determination for the Oromo, including and up to secession of Oromia, the economic lifeline of the country. To outplay these forces, the TPLF established the so-called Oromo People’s Democratic Organization (OPDO) and the Amhara Nation Democratic Movement (ANDM), largely from the prisoners of war it captured from the now decommissioned Ethiopian army of Colonel Mengistu Hailemariam (Henze 2000). Similarly, the so-called Southern People’s Democratic Movement (SPDM) was created by the TPLF to purportedly serve as a political vehicle representing the various interests of the close to 50 ethnic groups in southern Ethiopia.

As described in the background section, the OPDO, the ANDM and the SPDM are thus essentially satellite organizations whose core leaderships’ access to power is determined by their subservience to the rules laid down by the dominant party, the TPLF. For all practical purposes, they served TPLF politicians and generals that controlled and commanded the heights of Ethiopia’s powerful institutions like the military, the security establishment, and key economic institutions.

In order to dominate the Ethiopian political landscape, the TPLF deployed a number of other tactics—some more subtle than others. Having engineered the re-organization of the country along ethno-linguistic lines in the early 1990s, which took effect through the constitution of 1995, the ruling party drove out its junior partner, the OLF, from the transitional government using its military might, putting in concentration camps tens of thousands of Oromos suspected of having nationalist/independent tendencies, sending an unmistakable signal to anyone that opposing the TPLF entails harsh consequences.²³ While continuing to crack down on any potentially serious political opposition, the TPLF had also been organizing sham parliamentary elections, ’winning’ nearly one hundred percent of the seats.²⁴ When the regime made some gesture towards opening the political space for the opposition in 2005, the experiment ended badly, with its armed personnel killing about two hundred people in the capital alone, while forcefully dispersing a crowd gathered to demonstrate against what was widely panned as flagrant vote-rigging by the regime.²⁵

Other indicators of the disenfranchisement of non-Tegarus in Ethiopia’s political life under the TPLF included the near-total decimation of independent media and civic organizations that are critical of the incumbent party. These facts have been well-documented by various credible foreign and international organizations, including the Human Rights Watch, PEN International, the US State Department, Amnesty International, etc. In particular, the TPLF pursued independent Oromo voices with such ferocity that a former Ethiopian Defense Minister from TPLF (who had fallen out with his former comrades) once described the situation as, "Ethiopia’s prisons speak the Oromo language." By some estimates, upwards of 90% of the close to 90,000 political prisoners in Ethiopia were believed to be of Oromo origin.²⁶

The imposed hegemony of the Tegaru ruling class on the rest of Ethiopia in the last twenty five years has, arguably, been the main cause of the recent mass rebellion in the country, particularly in the Oromia and Amhara regions. Since the beginning of what is now popularly known as the Oromo-Protests in 2014, thousands of Oromos and Amharas have been killed by armed personnel loyal to the Ethiopian government, almost pushing the country to a state of being ungovernable. According to the index compiled by the Fund for Peace and the American magazine Foreign Policy, the country has been one of the most fragile states, and losing its carefully crafted image of a developmental state that has managed to move on from a vicious cycle of civil conflict and abject poverty.

Before 1991, the Amhara ruling class pursued a policy of assimilation, inducing the occupied subjects to abandon their identities (language, culture, and religion) through an array of formal and informal institutions and mechanisms, with the goal of creating an Ethiopian identity with the Amhara language and culture as its core elements. Intermarriages—particularly between the Oromo and the Amhara—were encouraged at all socio-economic levels, and it appears that these policies had been partially successful, creating millions of multi-ethnic Ethiopians tracing their lineage to two or more national groups. In order to achieve this and other objectives required for the building of the Ethiopian empire, millions of Amharas were resettled throughout the country, particularly in Oromia, creating a situation where the Amhara are the demographic majority in some cities in Oromia, including the capital Addis Ababa, which is also the capital of Oromia. According to the Housing and Population Census of 2007, for instance, the Amhara constitute close to half of Addis Ababa’s residents, with the Oromo making up less than 20% of the population in the capital.

The dominance of Ethiopia’s political economy by the TPLF in the last twenty five years can be distinguished from that of the Amharas before 1991 in one key respect. In a break from the previous centralized polity, the Tigrayan elites pursued a strategy of ‘indirect rule’ to achieve their dominance. Using collaborators from each ethnic group as described above, they set up various extractive institutions whose key objectives appear to be the socio-economic advancement of Tigray. This is the focal point we concentrate the rest of the paper on, as we try to understand the mechanisms through which unequal political representation may translate into unequal access to public goods in the country.

Appendix B. Regional maps of Ethiopia

See Appendix Figs. 8 and 9.

Fig. 8

Former provinces of Ethiopia before 1995 (source: https://www.mapsopensource.com/ethiopia-provinces-map.html)

Fig. 9

Current ethno-linguistic regions after 1995 (Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ethiopia_regions_english.png#/media/File:Ethiopia_regions_english.png)

Appendix C. Asset ownership rates comparison: Tigray vs. the rest

See Appendix Table 9.

Table 9 Comparison of asset ownership rates in Tigray and the control regions