Elections, Local Democracy and the Party: Structural Reasons for the Failure of Democratisation

Since 1991, Norwegian researchers have followed the democratisation process in Ethiopia, with a particular focus on the elections. They have also followed the development of human rights and democratisation process in other fields, such as the administrative decentralization, the process of land redistribution in the Amhara region, the court case against the leaders of the Derg regime, the process of drafting and approving the constitution, the development of human rights NGOs, and other events. This paper presents some examples of how elections were manipulated on a local level. It presents a democratic state with regular multi-party elections that prevents competing political groups from organising an efficient party structure, thus making it impossible for them to win an election.