Economic Development and Political Violence in Ethiopia

Ethiopia’s recent experiment with a developmental state model delivered double-digit economic growth and significant expansion of public services for nearly two decades. However, a wave of violent protests that began in 2014 culminated in a leadership change and the termination of the developmental experiment in 2018 as well as a regionalised civil war in 2020. In this working paper, we explore why Ethiopia yet again succumbed to political violence and instability by investigating the relationships between ethnic behaviour, economic development and political violence in the period 1997–2020. First, we explore trends in economic growth, horizontal and vertical economic inequality, as well as social mobility under Ethiopia's developmental state. Secondly, we account for temporal and geographic patterns and correlates of political violence in 1997–2019 by using ACLED data. Finally, we account for the microfoundations of political discontent using survey data on political preferences from 2020. Our survey data explores perceptions of individual and group-level relative deprivation, aspiration gaps, future expectations and social mobility. Our data and analysis indicate that Ethiopia maintained relatively low levels of horizontal inequality but that vertical inequality was poorly managed, which manifested itself through – among other things – low intergenerational mobility. We also find that political violence was driven by grievances (measured through economic vulnerability and repression), opportunity structures for mobilisation (measured through urbanisation and youth demographics) and the ethno-national composition of administrative districts. Contrary to the macro-level economic data, our micro-level survey data indicates that inter-group economic grievances trump perceptions of vertical or individual relative deprivation. Finally, we also test the extent to which political discontent is a function of increased aspirations that are stimulated by improved material well-being and thereby high aspiration gaps – or what is known as the ‘Tocqueville paradox’. We find no support for this counter-intuitive relationship in Ethiopia, as various indicators of frustration were negatively correlated with income