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Ethnicity, Economic Conditions, and Opposition Support: Evidence from Ethiopia's 2005 Elections

What do the 2005 parliamentary elections reveal about the nature of opposition support in Ethiopia? Although the final election results have been disputed by the major parties, these results do suggest that the race between ruling party and opposition party candidates was highly competitive in most electoral districts. However, there is no clear consensus among students of Ethiopian politics to explain the evident variation in opposition support across the country and especially across its largest regions. Some stress the role of ethnicity in determining support for the various opposition coalitions, while others point to such factors as nationalism and neopatrimonialism. The puzzle of opposition support in Ethiopia can be generalized to the rest of Africa, where ruling parties manage to win reelection by relying on a set of familiar strategies—distributing patronage, exploiting ethnic cleavages, and employing violence (van de Walle 2003; Adejumobi 2000; Diamond and Plattner 1999). While ruling parties’ deliberate manipulation of the electoral arena is well established in the Africanist literature (Takougang 2003; Makumbe 2002; Crook 1997), we still lack a clear conception of the factors that enable opposition parties to build popular support in countries where democracy has yet to be consolidated. We have no adequate explanation for why voters in some electoral districts are more willing to take a risk in opting for an opposition