Regime Preferences of Religious Minorities in Ethiopia

• In Event: Identity, Resistance, and Movement-Building

Abstract

Increasing authoritarian trends and human rights abuses in Ethiopia (Brown and Fisher 2020) have coincided with ongoing conflicts between the central government and ethnic groups like the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (Council of Foreign Relations 2023). While much of the current conflict in Ethiopia centers around ethnicity, historically religion in Ethiopian society has played a large role in influencing both state behavior and institutional development (Rupprecht 2018, Girma 2018) as well as the organization of civil society against human rights violations (Abbink 2014). I argue that to understand the current state of Ethiopian political development as well as prospects for sustainable forms of governance, the political preferences of structurally marginalized religious communities in addition to those of ethnic groups must be understood. To expand upon the development of a rights-oriented strategy of political development and conflict resolution in Ethiopia, I focus upon the role being the member of a minority religious group impacts an individual’s regime preferences in Ethiopia asking the following research question: Are religious minorities in Ethiopia likely to prefer liberal democracy and efforts at democratization? To answer this question, I use OLS linear probability as well as Ordinal Logistic Regression models to measure responses for several questions on regime preferences within the 2020 Ethiopia Afrobarometer survey.

Author

• Samuel Eisenkraft, SUNY University at Albany