By Worku Aberra
Introduction
Messay Kebede (2026) uses political culture to explain Ethiopia’s political trajectory, and his argument bears on three major outcomes: slow modernization, delayed capitalist development, and persistent authoritarian rule. Messay treats these outcomes together, yet the causal routes differ enough to warrant separate analysis. This rejoinder concentrates on authoritarian persistence, since the incentives for domination have appeared most clearly across regimes.
Messay attributes Ethiopia’s authoritarian durability to a distinctive conception of power; he treats cultural belief as the primary driver of regime outcomes. A political economy—rational choice approach asks how class relations, accumulation strategies, and bargaining under coercive threat shape elite choices. Institutions translate those pressures into payoffs: the terms on which property, revenue, security, and representation are distributed reward compliance and punish dissent; elites have consistently gained more from repression and cooptation than from concession. Messay moves from beliefs about power to durable authoritarian rule while leaving the institutional route implicit. Land tenure, fiscal capacity, military organisation, and federal design have shaped elite payoffs and popular reaction, the capacity of citizens to share information, build organisations, and act together without facing crushing retaliation. His essay leaves under-specified how those arrangements have shaped the costs of repression, the reach of patronage, and the credibility of reform promises.
The culture Messay describes — a conception of power that normalises domination, legitimates hierarchy, and stabilises unequal social relations — reads best as ideological justification for authoritarian rule, not as an independent cause of it. Class structure, accumulation patterns, and control over coercive force shape rulers’ incentives and set the basic payoffs of domination. Culture retains a role: it shapes how people read institutional arrangements, supplies the claims through which rulers seek legitimacy, and sets the coordination norms that encourage compliance or enable collective mobilisation. Its political force, though, depends on the institutional structures that carry it. Each section of this paper identifies a point where Messay’s emphasis on perception obscures material interests, institutional constraints, and strategic bargaining between incumbents and opposition actors, parties, armed movements, civic organisations, and dissident elites. His focus on power keeps authority, coercion, and legitimacy in view, but a persuasive diagnosis also needs institutional specification that can support a credible remedy.
Naturalisation of Political Hierarchy
Messay frames political hierarchy as natural and universal in premodern societies. He writes that “nature has planted the seed of a social order in which members submit to a dominant leader,” and that “all premodern cultures of the world have exalted political power”. The appeal to nature performs ideological mystification: it treats historically contingent relations of domination as necessity and places them beyond political contestation. Messay reinforces the claim with a functional defence when he argues that nature “had to magnify power” so society could cohere through fear-based obedience. The argument calls for empirical support, since it asserts universality, inevitability, and a single route from nature to domination.
Anthropological research reports substantial variation in premodern political forms and documents durable constraints on domination through social sanction. Woodburn’s comparative study of forager societies, the Hadza, the !Kung, the Mbuti, the Batek, the Paliyan, and the Pandaram, describes levelling practices that raise the social cost of would-be “big men” and sustain orders without centralised authority (Woodburn, 1982). Boehm develops the same point through “reverse dominance hierarchy,” where subordinates coordinate sanctions that discipline potential dominators (Boehm, 1999). Singh and Glowacki refine the picture by showing multiple political trajectories among non-agricultural societies, shaped by ecology, mobility, and material constraints; a single template does not fit the record (Singh & Glowacki, 2022). The variation in premodern political forms weakens Messay’s universal claim and supports a political economy interpretation: hierarchy stabilises when elites monopolise resources, organise coercion, and block collective sanction; war, conquest, and environmental crisis can accelerate that process by concentrating authority and weakening communal constraints; egalitarian order persists when communities sustain credible checks that raise the cost of domination.
Ethiopian cases also complicate Messay’s account of premodern political life as uniformly oriented toward centralised domination. The Oromo Gadaa system rotates leadership on an eight-year cycle and relies on communal adjudication (UNESCO, 2016). The Gedeo Baalle system assigns political authority and social duties across nine graded offices (Golle et al., 2021). Konso governance rests on age and generation grades that distribute authority across the community (Hallpike, 1972/2008). Burji customary rule relies on councils of elders and clan leaders, with village councils, an intermediate “three men council,” and a supreme council for dispute settlement and social regulation (Fiseha et al., 2011, as cited in Pankhurst & Assefa, 2008). These institutions develop within the same national setting Messay presents as consistently exalting domination, yet they institutionalise rotation, councils, and graded authority. Messay’s thesis needs to account for these counterexamples, since Ethiopian institutions that disperse authority undermine the claim that premodern societies uniformly exalt domination.
Naturalisation as a Device of Authoritarian Control
Naturalising political hierarchy produces immediate political effects. When public discourse treats dominance as a product of nature, citizens and elites read hierarchy as inevitable, and efforts to limit authority appear unrealistic. Folk wisdom carried the message into daily life: the saying in Ethiopia that not all fingers are created with equal length served to justify the unequal tenure arrangements of the imperial land system, recasting social hierarchy as bodily fact. Naturalisation legitimates coercion: it frames obedience as prudence, treats order as dependent on rulers, and casts resistance as reckless disruption. That framing lowers the moral cost of repression and raises the reputational cost of dissent.
Collective action theory explains the same effect through organisational and coordination costs. Mobilisation rests on shared expectations about participation, beliefs about the likelihood of success, and credible protection against retaliation. Naturalisation weakens each condition. It breeds resignation, reduces confidence that others will join, and strengthens incumbents’ threats by presenting rulers as the natural centre of order. The same framing raises coordination costs through stigma, coalition fragmentation, and selective rewards through patronage and access to local authority. Naturalisation thus operates as ideology and incentive structure: it legitimates domination, discourages organisation, and sustains authoritarian equilibria by casting resistance as irrational.
The Solomonic ideology that Messay discusses illustrates how naturalisation raised coordination costs against imperial authority. The Kibre Negest frames imperial authority as divinely ordained descent from Solomon and Sheba, and the Orthodox Church embedded that narrative in liturgy, chronicle, and court ritual (Levine, 1965; Ullendorff, 1968). Provincial lords faced two linked problems: a coordination problem, since rebellion required allies, yet each potential ally risked punishment if others defected, and a legitimation problem, since no rival narrative carried comparable authority and any challenger lacked a recognised claim to rightful rule. The Solomonic claim raised the cost of the first move by casting the emperor as God’s representative and rebellion as sacrilege, and the Church’s territorial presence through parish networks and samon lands reinforced the message at the local level (Crummey, 2000). The ideology did not eliminate revolt — Zemene Mesafint, Woyane 1943, and regional uprisings show that coordination succeeded when material grievances and elite fractures lowered the threshold — yet it raised the baseline cost of collective action and gave incumbents a legitimation resource that competitors lacked (Gebru Tareke, 1991; Clapham, 1969). Naturalisation worked not because subjects believed uniformly in divine kingship, but because the belief altered expectations about others’ willingness to act.
Conceptual Imprecision: Whose Conception of Power?
Messay’s claim that an “Ethiopian conception of power” explains slow modernization and recurrent authoritarianism needs a clearer bearer. He treats the conception as shared across rulers and ruled, even though interests, exposure to coercion, and access to resources vary with social position, organisational role, and historical context. Elites adopt legitimating doctrines that rationalise control of coercion, revenue, and office. Ordinary people can accept the ruling ideology as well, yet their acceptance operates under different conditions: it rests on lived experience with officials, courts, land administration, and local authority, and it persists when compliance delivers security and access while dissent carries punishment. The same ideology carries different weight depending on whether it justifies power one holds or rationalises power one endures. Any claim about an “Ethiopian conception of power” therefore needs a specified bearer and a mechanism that links belief to institutional leverage and strategic behaviour.
Regime ideologies illustrate the problem. Monarchical legitimacy rests on Solomonic descent and divine election, with rulers as “incarnating God’s choice”. The Derg justifies rule through Ethiopian socialism. The EPRDF frames authority through ethnicism. Authoritarian outcomes persist across these ideological differences, and that persistence points to durable incentive structures and institutional levers that outlast any single legitimating language. Popular political belief also varies across regimes. Divine legitimacy can command broad assent under monarchy; the Solomonic narrative reduced reliance on sustained coercion; this partially explains why imperial state handled the student movement with restraint. Ethiopian socialism won less assent and attracted open resistance; the Derg leaned far more heavily on coercion, surveillance, and punishment to secure compliance. Ethnicism did not command broad consent across society despite acceptance by ethnic elites; in parts of the South, citizens dismissed ethnic politics as the “Meles disease”. The state leaned on administrative control, patronage, and security enforcement to manage dissent. Across regimes, ideologies have changed, yet authoritarian outcomes have persisted because rulers adjust the mix of consent and coercion to the compliance that institutions and public belief sustain. The “Amhara oppressor” narrative follows a similar pattern, gaining traction in some constituencies through mobilisation, propaganda, and media, even when the claim lacks stable grounding in lived experience across groups and periods.
The persistence of authoritarian outcomes across ideological shifts points to institutional levers that survive regime change. Three stand out. State control over land has endured from the rist and gult tenure of the monarchy, through the 1975 nationalisation under the Derg, to the constitutional entrenchment of public ownership under the EPRDF; each arrangement has given incumbents administrative authority over rural livelihoods and surplus extraction from the agrarian system (Rahmato, 1984; Crummey, 2000; FDRE, 1995). Military organisation has remained centralised and loyal to the executive: the imperial army served the throne, the Derg militarised the state through conscription and Soviet-backed expansion, and the TPLF—EPRDF built a party-penetrated security apparatus that has continued under the current government (Clapham, 1988; Gebru Tareke, 2009; Pausewang et al., 2002). Fiscal centralisation has concentrated revenue extraction and distribution at the centre; control over foreign exchange, aid disbursement, and public investment has raised the value of office under all three regimes (Eshetu Chole, 1984; Lie & Mesfin, 2018). These institutional constants, not a cultural conception of power, supply the durable scaffolding of authoritarian rule.
Messay identifies a mechanism that nearly converges with the institutional argument of this rejoinder. He writes that “an outdated conception and system of power were licensed to operate in a modern setting, with its modern army, bureaucracy, systems of control,” and that premodern components, “grafted onto modern capabilities… use them to sustain themselves, unchanged and more dominant than ever before”. The observation describes institutional capture: incumbents who control the state absorb imported organisational technologies, modern armies, centralised bureaucracies, surveillance systems, and foreign-financed fiscal capacity; they deploy those technologies through existing structures of extraction and political control. Messay frames the process as cultural persistence, a traditional conception of power absorbing modern tools.
The institutional reading reverses the emphasis: rulers adopt modern coercive and administrative capacity because it raises the payoff to strategies they already pursue under existing incentive structures. The imperial army adopted European weapons and drill because centralised military power raised the returns to territorial control and tribute extraction (Clapham, 1969; Bahru Zewde, 2002). The Derg absorbed Soviet military organisation because it amplified the coercive capacity on which the regime depended after legitimacy collapsed. The TPLF—EPRDF built a party-penetrated administration that extended surveillance to the kebele level because administrative reach raised the returns to patronage, discipline, and political compliance (Vaughan & Tronvoll, 2003; Human Rights Watch, 2010). In each case, the “articulation” of old and new reflects strategic adoption under institutional incentives, not the cultural survival of a premodern mindset. The traditional conception of power did not capture modern tools; incumbents with unconstrained authority found that modern tools made existing strategies more profitable.
Culture as Hegemony
Culture enters political rule through hegemony, since consent reduces the cost of coercion. Gramsci defines hegemony as rule that rests on common sense, education, and moral authority, alongside coercion (Gramsci, 1971). The Orthodox Church, discussed earlier as a vehicle for Solomonic legitimation, illustrates the point. Messay assigns it a cultural role as a reinforcer of Kibre Negest tradition, yet the Church’s political influence rested on material foundations: samon tenure and tributary exemptions provided land, revenue, and privilege, and those resources financed clerical organisation, sustained patronage, and enabled the repeated production of legitimacy that aligned clerical authority with monarchical power (Crummey, 2000; Eshetu Chole, 1984). The 1975 land nationalisation of the Derg removed much of the Church’s material base, yet the Church endures because religious authority also rests on ritual life, social networks, and symbolic standing that land reform seldom erases. The Church remained silent or implicitly supportive under both the Derg and the EPRDF, adapting to successive regimes once its organisational survival was secured, a pattern that points to institutional calculation, not autonomous cultural commitment. Messay’s cultural account gains analytic force once it specifies whose ideas matter, the institutions that reproduce them, and the incentives that sustain authoritarian strategies across ideological change.
The EPRDF’s ideological infrastructure offers a second example of culture operating through institutional channels. The front built a cadre system that extended from central party schools to kebele-level political education, and that system trained local officials, teachers, and development agents in revolutionary democracy and ethnic federalism as the authoritative frame for governance (Bach, 2011; Lefort, 2012). Textbooks, state media, and regional-language broadcasting reinforced ethnonationalist historiography that cast the old state as “an Amhara colonial project” and framed ethnic self-determination as the remedy (Vaughan & Tronvoll, 2003). The cadre system did cultural work — it shaped categories of political identity, defined acceptable grievance, and normalised party-led development — yet its reach depended on institutional resources: salaries, promotion ladders, access to land-use certification, and selective punishment for non-compliance (Human Rights Watch, 2010). Cultural reproduction here rested on material incentives and organisational capacity, not on autonomous belief, and the pattern supports the claim that ideology gains political force through the institutions that carry it.
Monocausality and Voluntarism
Messay presents Ethiopia’s political impasse as a cultural problem, then treats cultural renewal as the main remedy. He concedes complexity when he writes that “this dramatic failure is the product of numerous interlocking factors,” yet he elevates “the Ethiopian conception of power” as the decisive driver of Ethiopia’s political outcome. The move gives the argument a monocausal cast and sidelines the role of institutional and material constraints. His remedy follows the same path. He calls for cultural renovation, “to modernize our conception of power, we must undergo a cultural change so that our culture catches up with the requirements of modernization,” and he urges a moral turn, “it is high time we transition from victimhood to coming together and taking responsibility”. Moral exhortation can motivate, but durable restraint on rulers depends on binding institutions. Party rules, civil–military relations, fiscal oversight, judicial independence, and enforcement coalitions set the payoffs for coercion and patronage; they decide whether elites face credible limits in practice.
Messay centres cultural attitudes, yet his account does not specify how cultural change converts into enforceable constraints; as a result, the proposed remedy stays at the level of aspiration. Institutional change offers a more tractable route because it alters the payoffs that rulers face directly. When land tenure reform gives citizens secure rights independent of administrative discretion, incumbents lose a lever of political discipline. When fiscal decentralisation ties revenue to local taxation, officials answer to taxpayers whose compliance they need, not to patrons whose favour they seek. When military and security agencies report to independent oversight bodies with sanctioning authority, the cost of deploying coercion against political opponents rises. When electoral administration operates under judicial enforcement and credible monitoring, manipulation becomes riskier and costlier to sustain. Each of these changes restructures incentives: rulers who once found repression and cooptation cheap encounter higher costs for authoritarian strategies and lower costs for accommodation. Cultural attitudes may shift in response — citizens who experience enforceable rights develop new expectations about authority — yet the causal priority runs from institutional redesign to altered incentives to changed behaviour, not from moral exhortation to transformed belief to democratic outcomes.
Messay advances a more specific claim beneath the general “conception of power“: that Ethiopian rulers treat power as entitlement, not mandate. He writes that claimants “see it as what is owed to them, as an ascription,” and that a ruler’s mission “is not a mandate from the people… but a self-assignment and, as such, answerable to them only”. The formulation names a concrete belief about the relationship between ruler and office. The pattern, though, tracks institutional design more than cultural disposition. When military victory operates as the selection mechanism, when no electoral route to office exists, and when no enforceable body holds rulers accountable after accession, entitlement behaviour becomes the rational response to the incentive structure. Rulers act as owners of office because institutions treat them as owners: they face no credible mechanism of removal, no binding mandate, and no sanction for self-dealing. The entitlement dissolves not when rulers adopt a new cultural attitude toward power, but when institutional redesign introduces competitive selection, enforceable limits on tenure, and credible penalties for abuse. Entitlement is a symptom of unconstrained office, not its cause.
Personality Psychology and Preference Formation
Messay’s turn to personality psychology disrupts the causal architecture of the cultural argument. He suggests that “individuals with … problems of self-image are drawn … to the allure of power,” because power offers compensation for an inferiority complex. A cultural-structural account explains dictatorship through shared norms and through institutions that reproduce domination; a personality-centred account explains dictatorship through leader traits and through selection effects. Each pathway implies a different research design and a different remedy. Cultural change as a remedy implies transforming legitimacy norms and mass expectations across society. Personality matters: leaders differ in ambition, risk tolerance, and capacity for cruelty, and those differences shape how power is exercised. The productive question is not whether personality plays a role, but whether institutional design can contain it: selection procedures, enforceable constraints, and accountability mechanisms that limit the damage any single ruler can inflict regardless of temperament.
Messay also advances a claim about popular subjectivity that turns on preference formation. He writes that “the people themselves derive their social identity from the fact that they serve a great lord.” He presents this as a cultural disposition, yet the identity he describes is politically constructed: land tenure that ties subsistence to a patron, court hierarchies that distribute status through loyalty, religious authority that sanctifies the relationship, and administrative structures that reward proximity to power and punish independence channel people toward deriving self-worth from service because the political economy leaves few other routes to security, recognition, or advancement.
A material account therefore explains how domination shapes what people come to value. Work on adaptive preferences argues that domination narrows feasible options and reshapes aspirations over time (Elster, 1983; Sen, 1999). Theories of hegemony offer a second route, since consent can rest on schools, religious authority, party organisation, and everyday social discipline, alongside coercion and material dependence (Gramsci, 1971). Engagement with these approaches clarifies whether submission reflects belief, fear, constrained choice, or a mix of the three; it links culture to institutions through testable channels.
Whether deference reflects adaptive preferences or strategic compliance carries practical weight because each mechanism implies a different political response. If deference reflects adaptive preferences shaped by prolonged exclusion, political change requires expanded options and sustained experience of alternative authority before expectations shift, a slow process tied to education, organisational experience, and material independence (Sen, 1999). If deference reflects strategic compliance under surveillance, change can arrive quickly when coercive capacity fractures, as the rapid mobilisation after the Derg’s collapse and again during the 2014–2018 protest wave suggests (Abbink, 2006; Lefort, 2018). Evidence from Ethiopia confirms that expressed support is strategic, not internalised: survey research on political trust and satisfaction under authoritarian rule records high stated support for incumbents, yet protest surges and electoral surprises — the 2005 election results in Addis Ababa being the clearest case — reveal latent opposition that surfaces when coordination costs fall and repressive credibility weakens (Aalen & Tronvoll, 2009; Arriola & Lyons, 2016). Citizens express loyalty when coercion makes dissent costly and withdraw it when coercive capacity fractures, a pattern that tracks institutional conditions, not cultural disposition.
A persuasive account of culture and power therefore specifies the institutional conditions under which deference persists and the conditions under which it collapses, and the speed at which Ethiopian deference has collapsed when coercive capacity fractures suggests that Kebede’s cultural explanation overstates the depth of internalisation and understates the role of institutional coercion in sustaining compliance.
Ethno-nationalists and the “Amhara Oppressor”
Ethnonationalist grievance politics exposes a weakness in Messay’s reasoning: the fact that elites from different ethnic groups behave similarly once in power does not refute demands for a different distribution of representation, territory, and rights within the state. He writes that “Oromo elites… did not fare better in democratizing the country” and that “the same failure was observed… when the Tigrayan elites ruled,” then he concludes that blaming Amhara culture proves “mistaken, since other ethnic groups did not show a different disposition”. Messay treats the convergence as evidence that no single ethnic culture drives authoritarianism, and his critique targets the ethnonationalist claim that Amhara culture is specifically to blame. The argument holds against ethnicised blame, yet it conflates two distinct questions. Incumbents across groups converge because office brings common incentives, rents, survival, and control of coercion; convergence signals a logic of incumbency, not the absence of distributional grievance (Acemoglu & Robinson, 2006). Claims about representation, territory, and rights operate on a different plane, and those stakes can diverge even when incumbents behave alike.
Messay’s point identifies a real problem in ethnicised blame, yet it slides between levels of analysis and risks confusing elite conduct with group character. A more defensible critique distinguishes state oppression from ethnic essence: resistance to subjugation can rest on justified grievances, while the diagnosis of an “Amhara colonial state” and the label of the Amhara as an “oppressor nation” mislocate the source of domination and transform institutional conflict into collective blame directed at an entire ethnic community. Once the state is identified with a single group, the transfer from opposing a regime to targeting a people requires little political effort.
Neither the monarchy nor the military government perceived itself as representing a particular ethnic group; each claimed to govern Ethiopia as a whole, and ruling circles drew members from multiple regions and backgrounds even when Amhara figures held disproportionate influence. Ethnonationalists recast both regimes as “Amhara governments,” projecting onto an entire ethnic community a mythic political agency that carried the intentions, benefits, responsibilities, and injustices of state power. The projection bore little resemblance to the historical record: Amhara-speaking peasants lived under the same tributary extraction, military conscription, and administrative coercion as their counterparts elsewhere, and regional development patterns reflected fiscal centralisation and infrastructural neglect, not ethnic favouritism. The construct nonetheless served a political function: it concentrated blame, clarified demands, and lowered coordination costs. By treating the Amhara as collective beneficiaries of imperial and military rule, ethnonationalist movements manufactured a grievance framework that justified compensatory policies, territorial claims, and redistributive programmes directed at or away from the Amhara community on the basis of an ascribed historical role that the evidence does not support.
Messay’s emphasis on “victimhood” calls for a sharper distinction between moral posturing and justified claims for security, rights, and representation. Grievance articulation responds to extraction, coercion, and exclusion; mobilisation aims to alter payoffs that shape the choices of incumbents and challengers. A more precise account treats ethnonationalist narratives as strategic tools that can solve coordination problems, yet can also intensify insecurity, fragment coalitions, and lock competition into zero-sum claims.
Ethnic Federalism as an Obstacle to Democracy
As stated earlier, Messay links Ethiopia’s democratic failure to an enduring “conception of power,” and he treats popular consent as the proper basis of sovereignty: “the sovereignty of the people is an integral and essential feature of modernization”. He nonetheless tolerates ethnic federalism as a concession that can placate ethnonationalist demands. That position creates tension inside his argument. A consent-based theory of sovereignty treats the people of a country as the ultimate source of authority, yet Ethiopia’s constitution vests sovereignty in “Nations, Nationalities and Peoples” (FDRE, 1995, art. 8) and extends group-based self-determination rights up to secession (FDRE, 1995, art. 39). The two principles pull in opposite directions: one locates authority in a common citizenry, the other distributes it among constitutionally designated ethnic communities.
Group sovereignty encourages political competition among the elite over territory, language, and office, since control of a region can deliver distributive authority, administrative discretion, and coercive access. Political membership and entitlement track ethnoregional categories more than a uniform civic principle; differentiation follows from design. Minority protection inside regional states becomes a persistent problem: minorities can face exclusion from representation, insecurity in boundary disputes, and barriers in local administration when regional majorities treat institutions as ethnic property, even when formal equality exists on paper (International IDEA, 2018; Vaughan, 2003). A constitutional design that organises rule through ethnoregional claims shapes elite strategy, mass mobilisation, and authoritarian survival, and renders popular sovereignty structurally unattainable because political competition tracks group membership, not common citizenship (Aalen, 2006; Vaughan & Tronvoll, 2003). Messay’s defence of popular sovereignty and his tolerance of ethnic federalism cannot coexist, since the constitutional structure he accepts is the institutional source of the democratic failure he diagnoses.
Ethnic federalism increases the cost of mobilisation against authoritarian rule by fragmenting coalition formation and raising coordination costs. Opposition actors face a collective action problem: citizens mobilise when expected benefits exceed expected penalties, and organisation lowers uncertainty about participation. Ethnoregional party systems raise the price of trust, since leaders compete inside separate arenas, frame grievances through separate constituencies, and trade cross-cutting bargains for local advantage. Incumbents exploit that structure through divide-and-rule, patronage, and selective repression, since fragmentation limits credible joint action across regions and identities (Aalen, 2006; Vaughan & Tronvoll, 2003). Rational choice theory treats the result as an equilibrium: authoritarian incumbents retain power when coordination stays expensive, repression stays affordable, and challengers lack credible enforcement for agreements across ethnoregional lines.
The implication runs against Messay’s remedy. If ethnic federalism raises the structural cost of democratic coordination, cultural self-transformation cannot overcome an obstacle embedded in constitutional design. Citizens may embrace consent-based norms and reject domination, yet the institutional framework channels their political energy into ethnoregional competition, rewards ethnic mobilisation over cross-cutting alliance, and hands incumbents a ready-made architecture of division. The more direct remedy is abandonment of ethnic federalism in favour of a constitutional order that vests sovereignty in a common citizenry, guarantees individual rights and minority protections independent of territorial ethnic claims, and organises representation through institutions that lower the cost of broad coalition formation.
That redesign alters incentives at the source: it removes the constitutional basis for group-based sovereignty that fragments opposition, it reduces the premium on controlling a regional state as a vehicle for distributive authority, and it raises the cost of divide-and-rule by denying incumbents ethnically segmented arenas to manipulate. Cultural change may follow institutional reform — citizens who organise across ethnic lines and experience shared political authority develop new solidarities — yet the sequence begins with the constitutional structure that shapes the choices available to citizens and elites, not with the beliefs they carry into those choices.
Authoritarian Elections
Messay treats authoritarian elections as expressions of a cultural disposition toward domination. He describes rigged contests as “consecration and celebration,” portrays landslide victories as instruments that “humiliate” opponents through displays of “powerlessness” and the ruler’s “invincibility,” and draws an analogy to “hijacker syndrome”. Gramsci’s account of hegemony sharpens the performative dimension: elections can serve as public ceremonies that normalise domination and cultivate consent through repeated affirmation (Gramsci, 1971; Schedler, 2002). Messay’s interpretation captures the ritual, yet it mistakes the function for the cause. Authoritarian elections persist not because rulers harbour a cultural need for public adulation, but because elections solve concrete governance problems that coercion alone cannot address. The cultural performance is real, yet it rides on strategic calculation: incumbents invest in elections because the returns — information, elite discipline, opposition fragmentation, and external legitimacy — exceed the costs.
Strategic incentives also explain why dictators invest in elections even when victory is fixed in advance. Elections reveal local balances of strength, they test brokers’ ability to deliver votes, and they identify districts where coercion or patronage yields the highest returns (Gandhi, 2008; Gandhi & Lust-Okar, 2009). Elections manage elites: they channel rivalry into controlled arenas, and they create formal roles that structure bargaining inside the regime (Gandhi, 2008). Elections shape opposition coordination as well: they provide moments for joint mobilisation, public signalling, and coalition formation, even amid repression (Gandhi & Lust-Okar, 2009). Elections also signal acceptability to external audiences, and they affect diplomatic support, aid flows, and monitoring judgments (Hyde, 2011; Kelley, 2009). Elections therefore function as instruments of rule that influence coalition stability, resource allocation, and regime survival (Schedler, 2002; Gandhi, 2008).
Conclusion
Messay’s essay advances Ethiopia’s political debate by putting power, not personality or ethnicity alone, at the centre of analysis. That emphasis sharpens the standard for leadership: authority derives from consent, accountability sustains it, and enforceable limits contain it. The argument also reaches beyond formal politics, since power orders social rank, shapes economic dependence, and governs everyday relations. Messay thus invites readers to strip domination of prestige and to treat authority as something citizens can question, limit, and replace.
Each section of this rejoinder has identified a point where cultural explanation runs ahead of institutional evidence. Naturalisation frames hierarchy as inevitable, yet premodern societies and Ethiopian indigenous governance show that domination stabilises only under specific material conditions. A single “Ethiopian conception of power” flattens the relationship between rulers and ruled: hegemony can produce shared beliefs, yet those beliefs carry different weight; the persistence of authoritarianism across Solomonic, socialist, and ethnicist legitimation points to institutional levers, land control, military centralisation, fiscal concentration, that survive ideological change.
Hegemony operates through material channels: Church tenure, cadre systems, and party-controlled services reproduce consent when backed by resources and sanctions. Monocausal emphasis on culture and voluntarist remedies leave the institutional route from attitude to constraint unspecified. Personality psychology and preference formation raise questions about compliance, yet the Ethiopian record suggests that deference reflects strategic calculation under surveillance, not internalised belief. Ethnonationalist narratives reduce coordination problems for challengers, yet they also fragment cross-ethnic coalitions and lock competition into zero-sum claims. Ethnic federalism compounds the obstacle by vesting sovereignty in corporate groups, producing differentiated rights, and raising the cost of broad mobilisation against authoritarian rule. Authoritarian elections combine ritual and strategic functions that reinforce incumbency.
Authoritarian persistence becomes clearer once institutions and incentives take priority. Land tenure, fiscal structure, federal design, and coalition incentives set elite payoffs and shape popular reaction; institutional arrangements determine whether rulers meet real constraints. Commitment problems and enforcement gaps then govern outcomes: oversight without teeth, security agencies without accountability, and mobilisation with high personal risk keep coercion and cooptation attractive to incumbents. Cultural appeals may inspire, yet institutions enforce; ideals may guide, yet incentives decide.
The analysis of authoritarian persistence leaves a related question open: why has Ethiopia not structurally transformed? Messay attributes slow modernization to culture, yet agrarian structure, the tributary mode of production, peripheral incorporation into the world economy, land tenure, external finance, and delayed industrialisation offer a more precise account. A future discussion should examine these domestic and external constraints together since slow modernization and persistent underdevelopment are two faces of the same institutional and structural problem. Together the two parts test Messay’s cultural thesis against institutional and material evidence across the full range of outcomes his essay addresses.
Worku Aberra Is a professor of economics at Dawson college, Montreal, Canada
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