Around the time economics as a coherent body of thought was emerging, there was a change in the perception of the poor. This came near the end of a long development. R. H. Tawney describes this change as a shift between the medieval “conception of society as a community of unequal classes with varying functions, organized for a common end” and the modern idea of society “as a mechanism adjusting through the play of economic motives to the supply of economic needs” (1962: 13).

It is possible to argue against the simplicity of Tawney's picture. The chasm may not have been as wide as he imagined or its beginning and ending points located exactly as he stated. Nevertheless, as Gertrude Himmelfarb suggests, to deny the gap “entirely is, in a sense to affirm it.” The claim that society is and always was nothing more than the sum of the strivings of individuals in the material world, that the economy is and was independent from and never subjugated to other motives and standards, is a “peculiarly modern way of thinking, patently at variance with the beliefs most people lived with for most of history” (Himmelfarb 1983: 23–24).

Tawney found the origin of this change in thinking in the sixteenth century with the spread of commercial agriculture. It continued and hastened with the spread of industrial activity after that time. He located the new ethic in the teachings of Puritanism, which diverged sharply in many respects from medieval beliefs.

Work

In a setting where the classical economist's notion of subsistence applies, to be poor means to be unable to lead a life appropriate to a defined social position. Occupying such a position carries the meaning of existing for others, specifically for the community. If we use the term poverty to characterize those who lack something vital for living, in this setting poverty refers to the lack of a vital connection to the community. The poor are those who have been excluded from the community, or they are those whose community has somehow failed.

As we have suggested, this idea becomes difficult to apply where we deal not with members of a community, but with individuals, not with need defined by social position, but with individual need. Here, if poverty refers to a lack, it cannot be the older connection with the community that has been lost. Rather than referring to the failure of the connection with community, poverty now refers to a failure in the shaping or maintaining of an individual identity. While this identity may incorporate attachment to a group, this attachment is chosen rather than ascribed, and the individual seeks the group not to find an identity, but to express and realize it.

Associated with individual identity are a set of appropriate beings and doings. Focusing for the moment on doings, we can consider poverty the inability to make what we do in life an expression of our individual identity.

Definition and measurement of poverty

Our conception of poverty applies to a society committed to the ideal of freedom. Freedom means that individuals are able to determine the sorts of lives they lead rather than having their lives determined for them. When individuals are free in this sense, it is not known in advance what sort of lives they will have or what those lives will require. Then, when we try to define poverty, we cannot mean a lack of a predetermined set of goods or income. Ways of thinking that define poverty as a lack of subsistence goods or of goods that will suffice to address basic needs falter where needs are not predetermined.

Thus, attempts to apply these notions to modern societies characterized by rapid transformation of needs, and by a breakdown of the hold of group norms on the shape of individual lives, are bound to fail. We see this failure in two broad areas. The first is the effort to define poverty by specifying a level of income separating the poor from the non-poor, as is done in the United States and has been tried elsewhere. The problem of freezing what is a fluid set of needs is seen in the crude method of coming up with a minimal food budget and multiplying by three. But even where the exact method differs, the need to revise repeatedly and fundamentally the method to calculate poverty lines shows the difficulties in the approach.

Introduction

In this chapter, we explore the meaning work has for the individual. This meaning is expressed in the individual's emotional investment in work. Our emotions mark the significance objects, activities, and persons have for us. The importance of emotions lies in the way they provide the individual with “an orientation toward the world,” a “framework through which the world is viewed” (Lear 1990: 51–52). This orientation is not, however, of the sort provided by a map or a compass. The difference lies both in the nature of the space we find ourselves in, and in the nature of the orientation we need within it. The space in which our emotions orient us, unlike the physical space of the map or compass, is the interpersonal space of relatedness with others. Furthermore, maps and compasses offer a sense of position in space, whereas emotions invest our position in space with its significance. Our emotions tell us what matters and what does not; and they tell us how it matters, especially whether it is good for us or poses a danger to our well-being. The emotional orientation is subject to distortion and the guidance it provides is not always accurate. It is, nonetheless, vital to any study that concerns itself with the meaningful orientation of the individual in the space of interaction and social organization.

What is the essential thing that we lack when we are poor? Answers to this question often refer to a set of goods, basic needs, or a minimum level of income. Despite their differences, these concepts all connect to a long-standing tradition of thinking in political economy that emphasizes the idea of subsistence. The idea of poverty as the lack of subsistence has played a central role in political economy since the first pages of the Wealth of Nations, where Adam Smith distinguishes between what he calls the civilized and savage states of man on the basis of the “abundance or scantiness” of the supply of the “necessities and conveniences of life” annually consumed.

However straightforward we might imagine this idea to be, even for the classical economists it turned out to involve complexities. Thus, we find the classical theorists using the term subsistence in two significantly different senses (see Levine 1998: ch. 1). According to the first, subsistence refers to needs associated with maintaining the physical integrity of the human organism, natural needs of human beings considered part of a natural order. According to the second, subsistence refers to needs associated with a culturally and historically determined way of life. The first account makes poverty a threat to the organism's physical survival; the second makes it a threat to its cultural survival. The two threats need not, of course, be entirely separate matters.

In this chapter, I turn to the model's expectations for the behavior of non-elites. The central expectation to be tested is that people will vote for candidates from their own tribes in one-party elections and for parties whose leaders belong to their language groups in multi-party elections. As in Chapter 7, I identify and test a range of observable implications of the model using a variety of data sources and analytical techniques.

The chapter is divided into three sections. In the first, I estimate and compare rates of tribal voting in one-party and multi-party elections. These analyses demonstrate that, while tribal identities are not the only motivation for voters' choices in either type of contest, Zambian voters nonetheless vote along tribal lines at measurably higher rates in one-party elections than in multi-party ones. In the second section, I focus exclusively on voting patterns in multi-party elections. First I present evidence to support the central assumption in the model that voters put more emphasis on candidates' party affiliations than on their individual backgrounds. Then I show that this emphasis on candidates' party affiliations leads voters to allocate their support on language group lines.

In the third section, I test the model's implications in a more fine-grained way through a pair of controlled experiments. The first compares the performance across elections of candidates that ran in the same constituencies in back-to-back contests.

This chapter develops and analyzes statistically a model of economic development that is consistent with the description of the changes in the Polish economy presented in the previous chapter. This model draws heavily on the arguments of Joseph Schumpeter ([1911] 1934) and later works of organizational theorists in sociology and economists in industrial organizations. Schumpeter's proposition is that economic growth is the “new combination” of materials and processes to create new products, production methods, markets, raw materials, or organizations: he also says these “new combinations are, as a rule, embodied, as it were, in new firms which generally do not arise out of the old ones but start producing beside them” (Schumpeter, 1934, pp. 65–66). The emphasis is on new firm creation, survival, and growth as a means for transforming and expanding economic activity rather than on the transformation and growth of existing enterprises. In fact, the new economic organizations displace and replace the older, outmoded ones – what Schumpeter and others refer to as creative destruction. The key variables of birth, survival, and growth of new firms constitute the entrepreneurial process.

MODELING NEW-FIRM CREATION, SURVIVAL, AND GROWTH

In our simple model of economic evolution, there are three central variables: the creation of new firms, the survival rates of these firms, and the growth rates of the surviving firms. This emphasis on these variables as a means for transforming and expanding economic activity is the focus of work in organizational ecology.

Chapter 5 presented a simple model of identity choice that helps us to account for why political competition in Zambia has tended to revolve around tribal differences in one-party settings and around language group differences in multi-party settings. The chapters of Part III present a series of analyses that test several of the model's observable implications. Chapter 6 sets the stage for these analyses by addressing and ruling out competing explanations. Chapters 7 and 8 then turn to the implications of the model itself. Chapter 7 focuses on its implications for the behavior of political elites, and Chapter 8 focuses on its implications for mass voting.

It bears underscoring from the outset that the implications being tested are about the relative salience of tribal and linguistic identities in different institutional contexts, not about the salience of ethnicity per se. Some Zambian politicians run for Parliament for no other reason than because they want the attention that being a candidate brings. Others are motivated by a commitment to national service. Some voters make their electoral choices because they are swayed by a politician's credentials or record of performance. Others vote for a particular person or party because they are bribed. In the context of the extreme poverty in which elections are fought in Zambia, a bag of mealie meal, a bolt of cloth, or even a T-shirt (along with the implicit promise that more such gifts are on the way) may be enough to buy a voter's support.

Chapter 2 showed how the institutions of colonial rule – that is, the policies, rules, and regulations put in place by the Northern Rhodesian colonial administration and its mining company partners – created incentives for Africans to invest in their identities as tribesmen and tribeswomen. In this chapter, I show how a different set of colonial-era actions and policies caused Africans also to think about themselves and the territory's ethnic divisions in language group terms. In addition, just as Chapter 2 showed how colonial-era institutions were responsible for shaping the locations and relative sizes of tribal communities, this chapter accounts for the number, distribution, and dimensions of the groups that make up Zambia's contemporary linguistic landscape.

The chapter is divided into four parts. The first part shows how colonial-era institutions led to the consolidation of language use patterns from a situation where dozens of different vernaculars were in use to one where four major languages predominated. The second part explains how these institutions led Zambia's four broad linguistic communities to have the relative sizes that they do and to be physically located in the parts of the country that they are. Having accounted for the contours of the landscape of linguistic divisions, the third part of the chapter explains why Africans in Northern Rhodesia had incentives to embrace and define themselves in terms of their language communities, and thus why language matters for self-identification and group classification in Zambia today.

Individual attitudes and votes are only the beginning of the electoral process. How individual choices translate into votes for the different parties in their respective districts, and then how the district vote distributions determine the parties' shares of the seats in the parliament are critical issues. This chapter examines the district voting returns in Poland's 1993, 1995, and 1997 elections and the allocation of seats that followed from these votes. This analysis is the acid test for our proposition about the development of a constituency supporting the continuation of the market reforms. If this constituency cannot affect election outcomes and the parties' strength in parliament, then evidence about individual attitudes and behavior is interesting but insignificant.

The theme in this chapter is the continuing examination of the connection between new economic activity and support for economically liberal parties and whether this support will offset some of the opposition to the reforms generated by the economic hardships. We want to know both the magnitude of this association so that we can estimate how many votes more de novo jobs might have stimulated and the stability of the association. If the liberal constituency is to be influential, its presence must be evident over time and not just in one election. Evidence of a consistent relationship between measures of the de novo economy and votes for the reform party or parties would lend greater credence to our basic argument.

This book develops and tests an argument to account for why and when one ethnic cleavage in an ethnically multi-dimensional society emerges as the axis of political competition and conflict instead of another. It builds its explanation around an account of the relative benefits that individuals receive from building or joining political coalitions constructed around different ethnic identities. I argue that the most beneficial identity will be the one that puts the person in a minimum winning coalition, and I show that, if everyone in society makes identity choices with this goal in mind, then a predictable ethnic cleavage will emerge as the basis of conflict in the political system.

The particular identities that individuals will find it most advantageous to choose will depend on the nature of the political system's ethnic cleavage structure. Understanding what the cleavage structure looks like is therefore a prerequisite for understanding the choices that political actors will make. To explain their choices, we will need to know two things about that structure. First, we will need to know the number of cleavage dimensions it contains. This will tell us the number of identities in people's repertoires and thus what the range of options is from which they are choosing. Second, we will need to know the number and relative sizes of the groups located on each cleavage dimension. This will help us (and the political actors) determine which identity it will be most useful to embrace.

The distinguishing feature of the Polish economy during the 1990s is the high rate of job creation among new firms, which provides an important counter to the job destruction among the large state-owned enterprises existing at the start of the transition. As indicated in the previous chapter, Poland was more successful than many other transitional economies in expanding the small and medium-sized enterprise section and in creating jobs in de novo firms. We now want to elaborate on that description; consider the policies of the Polish government, taken both before and after the dramatic changes beginning in 1989, that laid the basis for this creative activity; and discuss some of their social and political implications. This chapter sets the stage for the detailed statistical analyses of the Polish economic and political transformation in subsequent chapters.

INITIAL CONDITIONS AND POLICIES

Two developments during the 1980s had important consequences for Poland's simultaneous development of a market economy and a democratic political system during the 1990s. One is the determined effort throughout the 1980s to reform the economy under the guidelines provided by the concept of market socialism. These efforts at reform left several important positive and negative legacies for the new government taking over in 1989. The other development is the emergence of a strong independent union movement, Solidarność, which became a broad-based resistance movement and eventual political party.

The Polish transition, though successful in the aggregate, did not happen without considerable pain, and the success was not uniformly distributed throughout the country and among all segments of society. Table 2.2 shows that the unemployment rate escalated dramatically during the early reform years, reaching 17 percent in 1993, and even by 1997 was still close to double digits. Real wages, though they increased after 1993, did not return to prereform levels. These data indicate that, even though GDP exceeded prereform levels and grew at impressive rates, there were still reasons to be concerned about the quality of economic life, even several years after the reforms began. These aggregate conditions led some to question the pace, direction, and even the philosophy behind the reforms.

The previous chapter made it clear that some regions adapted more quickly and successfully to the transition. People in these areas were better equipped to start and grow new enterprises. Regions that entered the transition with good communications infrastructure, with higher levels of education, with a larger number of small private firms, and that created and expanded local development agencies and banks fared much better than other areas. The impact of the transition was also very unevenly distributed among individual Poles. One's age, work history, attitudes, and education were highly correlated with the ease or difficulty of the transition. Experiencing these benefits and costs naturally affected how one evaluated the reforms and how one began to affiliate politically.

Tables 2.1 and 2.2 summarize the changes over time in the population shares of tribes that did and did not have their own Native Authorities. Table 2.1 records the changes in these population shares between 1930/33, shortly after Indirect Rule began, and 1962, the year before it ended. Table 2.2 records changes in tribal population shares between 1930/33 and 1990, when, for the first time, data on self-reported tribal identifications became available. Both tables report only aggregate figures for tribes with and without Native Authorities. Tables A.1 and A.2 break down the figures for the individual tribes in each category for the 1930/33–1962 and 1930/33–1990 periods, respectively.

As Tables A.1 and A.2 make clear, individual tribes within each category vary in the changes that took place in their shares of the national population during each period. Although the population share of all tribes that had their own Native Authorities increased by 6.7 percent between 1930/33 and 1962, the degree of change experienced by individual tribes in this category ranged from +140 percent for the Luchazi to −83 percent for the Chikunda (see Table A.1). Similarly, while the population share of tribes that did not have their own Native Authorities fell during the same period by a weighted average of 28.5 percent, individual tribes in this category varied in their population growth or decline from +304 percent for the Kwandi to −95 percent for the Lushange.