Is Ethiopia Democratic? A Bureaucratic Authoritarian Regime

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Abstract
Although Henze does appear generally to accept the widely recognized statement of essential democratic norms offered by Robert Dahl, 1 he implicitly chooses not to work within the framework of contemporary empirical democratic theory. By contrast, I think empirical democratic theory can and should continue to be refined and applied even in countries like Ethiopia that lie outside Europe and the Americas. Empirical democratic theory involves the “formulation of hypotheses . . . which are in principle capable of being tested at the empirical level [and] made into operational hypotheses.” 2 In this case, the empirical question is what are the common elements of all systems claiming to be democratic, elements that constitute an empirical foundation for normative and analytical theories specifying necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of democracy. The contemporary conceptualizations of democracy’s necessary and sufficient conditions put forward by social scientists like Dahl and Seymour Martin Lipset, from which theories of democratic transition and consolidation ultimately derive, have been shaped by commonalities in the experiences of European and American countries claiming to be democratic. But with the post-Cold War expansion of democracy to Africa and other regions, we must now reconsider democracy’s theoretically necessary and sufficient conditions on the basis of commonalities in the global experience with efforts to establish and maintain democracy.

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