Ethnic Federalism in a Dominant Party State: The Ethiopian Experience 1991-2000 Lovise Aalen r 2002: 2

Selection of interviewees
The material collected through interviews is not intended to represent the
opinion of any particular group in Ethiopia, much less the Ethiopian people at
large. The interviewees were selected to ensure variety of opinion, but not
statistical representation, as my aim is to understand and not to measure
opinions on the Ethiopian federalisation process. As the list of informants will
show, I have deliberately chosen people known to have different opinions
about, knowledge of and interest in the issue. Apart from the fact that different
opinions might throw light on different aspects of the federalisation process, the
exploration of different opinions is a way of cross-checking the information
gathered. Before I started the actual data collection, I had already defined
which groups of people that I wanted to obtain information from. A detailed
list of informants inside each group, however, was adopted during the
collection process. As I achieved more knowledge of the Ethiopian political
system and its actors, I added more people within the pre-determined groups.
The interviewees can be categorised in four predetermined groups:
1. Government officials at the federal (Addis Ababa) and regional level (Tigray
and the SNNPRS), including both appointed and elected officials, i.e.
bureaucrats and politicians in power. All of the elected officials belong to the
ruling or its regional affiliate parties, and most of the bureaucrats, despite
their alleged neutrality, are loyal to the incumbent government.
9
See Appendix 2.

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2. Politicians and representatives of the opposition parties in Addis Ababa,
Tigray and the SNNPRS. Most of them were interviewed in the capital, since
the opposition parties generally are few and weak in the regional areas.
3. Academics working on issues related to the federalisation of Ethiopia, both
Ethiopians and foreigners.
4. Representatives of non-governmental organisations, media and ordinary
citizens particularly interested in the process of federalisation in Ethiopia.
The first of the groups, the governmental officials, is the most numerous. It
includes thirty-one people altogether. The majority of them are in political
positions, as representatives of the ruling party in the two regions.
Table 3.1 Overview of governmental officials interviewed (group 1)
Bureaucrats
Politically
Elected
Total
Federal level
3
5
8
Tigray region
5
8
13
SNNPRS
8
4
12