Uniting Demography and Social Movement Scholarship: How Protests Affect Transition into Marriage in Ethiopia

Liliana Andriano , University of Oxford
Effrosyni Charitopoulou, Collegio Carlo Alberto
Mathis Ebbinghaus , University of Leipzig

Protest can have many consequences, but its effects on demographic outcomes have largely escaped scholarly attention. Focusing on the case of Ethiopia, a country that has consistently experienced many protests over the past decades, we investigate how exposure to protest affects the timing of marriage. Building on scholarship in social movements and demographic literature, we suggest micro-level mechanisms through which protest affects transition into marriage. We use geo-referenced individual-level data from the 2016 Ethiopia Demographic and Health Survey to link the marriage histories of 4,398 young women with fine-grained measures of exposure to protest and other types of conflict which are compiled from four major conflict datasets. Using discrete-time event history analyses, we examine how protest exerts demographic influence that differs from other types of conflict. We find that protest delays transition into union, but we do not find an effect for other types of conflict. The finding that protest delays transition into union supports our theoretical argument that protest raises expectations for concrete change which affects people’s decision making. Case studies of the Oromo Protests from 2014 to 2016 corroborate the social mechanisms that underpin statistical associations. Our paper is a first step towards studying the demographic outcomes of protest and has important implications for understanding the causes of the timing of marriage in Ethiopia.

See extended abstract

 Presented in Session P1. Postercafe