Ethical altruistic voting in a multi-ethnic developing country

Evidence from Ethiopia.

Marie-Anne Valfort

March 2006

Abstract

Referring to Aristotle’s "Politics", we define "ethical altruistic voting" in a multi-ethnic developing country as the individual’s renouncement of voting for an ethnic party that will favour his ethnic group at the expense of all others regarding public good allocation, so as to promote instead an "Ethiopia-oriented" party struggling for an equitable allocation of public good among ethnic groups. Ethical altruistic voting may thus be considered as a way of preventing internal conflicts from emerging in the political community, and of creating instead a state of concord potentially favouring economic growth and poverty reduction.In this paper, we investigate whether "ethical altruistic voting" exists in such a framework, by focusing on Ethiopian politics where ethnicity has been widely politicized over the last decade by the Tigray-based ruling party EPRDF. We exploit the results of a questionnaire submitted for that purpose to 331 students from the Addis Ababa University in May 2004. Respondents’ political preferences are revealed through an "approval voting" question and a "voting" question.We implement a three-step analysis.We first address the complex issue of ethnicity in Ethiopia by highlighting how it has been manipulated by the current political elite to implement a "divide and rule" strategy.We then model a utility function showing individuals’ trade-off betweenegoism and ethical altruism and predict, according to the degree ofethical altruism, the results of both the "approval voting" and the "voting" questions. We finally test these predictions by relying on a probit analysis after having made sure that our understanding of the Ethiopian political landscape coincides with the students’ one.Our results widely confirm such predictions and clearly establish theexistence of ethical altruistic voting. In this setting, the resounding victory of CUD, a newly-formed coalition of "Ethiopia-oriented" opposition parties that won 20 out of 23 seats dedicated to Addis Ababa at the House of People’s Representatives during last May 2005 national elections, may partly illustrate ethical altruistic voting behaviours on the part of Ethiopian citizens.

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