Conceived narrowly, this is a book about how transitions between multi-party and one-party rule affect the relative political salience of tribal and language group identities in Zambia. But it is also a book about how political institutions affect social identities more broadly. Its empirical focus may be on an African case, but its implications extend well beyond the African continent. The specific argument the book advances is about how regime change affects people's choices between tribal and linguistic identities, but the general logic it articulates extends well beyond these particular independent and dependent variables. The logic it provides offers a general set of guidelines for thinking about when and why people choose the social identities they do and when and why one social cleavage rather than another becomes salient in political interactions. It also provides a vocabulary and a conceptual framework for thinking about the many different aspects of identity change. Thus while the specific application presented in the preceding chapters may be somewhat narrow, the implications of the analysis and the applications of the argument and framework are potentially far reaching.

INSTITUTIONS AND BOUNDARY CHANGE

Take the argument about how institutions affect the kinds of identities that become salient. One of the book's central premises is that the identities and cleavages that will emerge as bases of political competition will depend on the boundaries of the arena in which political and social interactions take place.

We began with the question, Why Poland? The answer in Chapter 1 was based on comparing the pace and early success of the Polish reforms, both economic and political, with those of other transitional countries. The comparisons suggested that Poland was a relative success, at least in the initial years, and that we could learn important lessons about transitions from studying the Polish transformation in detail. This chapter addresses the same question, but with a different meaning. We can now interpret the question in terms of what factors explain Poland's relative success. We have observed and analyzed in great detail the more and less successful aspects and consequences of Poland's transition. According to this interpretation, the answers are unique in some respects but broadly general in others. The challenge is to examine factors contributing to the Polish transition in the context of other political economies in Central and Eastern Europe.

LESSONS FROM THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF TRANSITION

The answer begins with the two main lessons from our study. Our analysis suggests that Schumpeter's model of economic development, though nearly a century old, is applicable in a broad range of settings. Successful development and transitions depend on what he called the creative destruction process in which firms with outdated technologies, organizational structures, or products are replaced by new enterprises embodying new forms. The presence and growth of these new enterprises stimulates a political constituency that supports liberal policies and continued economic reform.

In a context where resources are assumed to be distributed along ethnic lines, and where the fairness of the current pattern of distribution is judged by the correspondence between the share of resources that each group controls and the share of the population it can claim as members, accurate information about the ethnic composition of the country's population can be highly inflammatory (Hirschman 1987; Diamond 1988; Wright 1994; Horowitz 1985). As Horowitz puts it: “Numbers are an indicator of whose country it is” (1985: 194). For this reason, questions about respondents' ethnic backgrounds are simply not asked in the national censuses of most developing nations.

In a striking departure from this norm (and for reasons I do not fully understand), the 1990 Republic of Zambia Census of Population and Housing collected data on the tribal backgrounds of census respondents. Although this information was not included in any of the descriptive tables published by the Zambia Central Statistical Office (ZCSO) – “respondent's Zambian tribe” was the only variable omitted from the otherwise comprehensive cross-tabulations – it remained in the raw data, which I was able to obtain from the ZCSO. This data set, which contains the self-reported tribal affiliations of 7,383,097 individuals, provided me with an indispensable (and unparalleled) source of information for the analyses that I undertake in this book.

Why, and when, do some social cleavages emerge as politically salient rather than others? In the preceding pages, I have sought to shed light on this question by exploring the case of Zambia – a country that, for the complexity of its ethnic landscape, the richness of its empirical record, and the advantageous pattern of its institutional variation, offers a particularly good laboratory for studying the determinants of identity choice and cleavage change. The specific outcome that I have sought to explain in the Zambian case is why tribal identities served as the basis of electoral mobilization and voting during one-party elections and language group identities played this role during multi-party elections. I began by showing why tribe and language, but not other possible bases of social mobilization, are available to Zambian political actors as potential foundations for political coalitions. Then, to account for why political actors find it advantageous to identify themselves in terms of one of these ethnic identities rather than the other, I developed a simple model to account for why people embrace the ethnic identities they do. Finally, I showed how the incentives that the model illuminates are affected by changes in the rules that specify whether one party or many may legally compete in the political arena.

In its general form, the central argument of the book can be summarized as follows: given a widespread expectation that elected officials will favor members of their own ethnic groups in the distribution of patronage benefits, voters will seek to better their lot by electing members of their own ethnic groups to positions of political power.

This is a book about ethnic conflict, but it is not about ethnic conflict in the usual sense. Most treatments of the subject focus on explaining variation in the occurrence or intensity of ethnic violence across time and space. They ask: why did tensions between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda erupt into full-blown genocide in 1994 (Prunier 1995; Gourevitch 1998)? Why have Hindu–Muslim riots taken place in some Indian towns but not in others (Varshney 2002; Wilkinson 2004)? Why, since the mid-1970s, has there been so much more ethnic violence in Sri Lanka than in Malaysia (Horowitz 1989)? This book, by contrast, seeks to explain not when or where communal conflict breaks out but why it breaks out along one line of ethnic division instead of another. It seeks to explain why politics comes to revolve around the particular axis of ethnic cleavage that it does.

I fell into this research topic by accident. When I first went to Zambia in 1993, I thought I was going to be studying how Zambia's recent transition to multi-party politics had affected the relations among the country's ethnic groups. I thought I was going to be studying whether the introduction of competitive multi-party elections had deepened ethnic divisions and made ethnicity a more salient part of the country's political affairs. Given this motivating question, I began my research by conducting a series of open-ended interviews in one of Lusaka's poor residential compounds to probe how people from different ethnic communities were getting along in the new multi-party era.

By most observers' reckoning, Poland during the 1990s was the poster child for a successful transition from a country with a one-party Communist authoritarian government and a centrally planned command economy to one with a relatively stable multiparty democracy with a thriving market economy. In the same time span that the United States measures a two-term presidency, Poland went from a period in which the main economic issue was no longer a shortage of goods but rather a proper distribution of access to the abundance of goods in the stores. The questions about whether a private market could take root and survive had been replaced by concerns that the growth of this private market may have outpaced the public sector's ability to provide the social services deemed to be necessary in a capitalistic society. Muted objections to a one-party state and the minimal likelihood of an alternative developed into open debates about whether there are too many parties. In the bigger picture, these concerns, as real as they are, provide an accurate barometer of the distance Polish economic, political, and social institutions have come since the 1980s. We document these changes in detail, analyze how they have contributed to the Polish success, and make some inferences about what elements contribute to successful and simultaneous economic and political transitions. This chapter places the Polish transition in the context of transitions in a set of Central and Eastern European countries, including the Czech Republic, Hungary, the Baltic states, Russia, and Ukraine.

Nearly all multi-ethnic political systems contain more than one dimension of ethnic cleavage. Israel is divided by religion, but its citizens are also divided by their places of origin and their degrees of secularism. South Africa is divided by race, but also by language differences and by tribe. India is divided by language (which serves as the basis for its federalism), but also by religion and caste. Switzerland is divided by religion and by language. Nigeria is divided by religion, region, and tribe. Even sub-national units are frequently ethnically multi-dimensional: cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Miami all contain prominent racial cleavages, but also cleavages based on their residents' countries of origin, languages of communication, and lengths of residence in the United States.

Given these multiple bases of ethnic division, when does politics revolve around one of them rather than another? Journalists and scholars who write about the politics of ethnically divided societies tend to take the axis of ethnic cleavage that serves as the basis for political competition and conflict as a given. They write eloquently about hostilities between Hindus and Muslims in India but never pause to ask why that country's conflict takes place along religious lines rather than among Hindi-speakers, Bengali-speakers, and Marathi-speakers. They discuss the competition among Hausas, Yorubas, and Igbos in Nigeria but never stop to question why the political rivalries in that nation rage among these broad ethno-regional communities rather than between Christians and Muslims.

In 1984, Cherry Gertzel and her colleagues from the University of Zambia published a book, The Dynamics of the One-Party State in Zambia, whose purpose was to describe the origins and workings of the country's new single-party political system. Much of the book's analysis drew on a detailed study of the general election of 1973, the first contest held after the country suspended multi-party competition and moved to one-party rule. In the course of describing the campaign and interpreting the voting patterns that emerged in the 1973 race, the authors observed, almost in passing, that politicians seemed to be emphasizing, and voters seemed to be embracing, different kinds of ethnic identities than they had in 1968, the last election held under the old multi-party system. They noted that, whereas campaigning during the 1968 general election had revolved around the competition among broad, linguistically defined voting blocks, campaigning in 1973 seemed to revolve around the conflicts between local tribal groups. Whereas voters had overwhelmingly supported representatives of their language groups in the multi-party contest, they seemed to ignore language group distinctions and line up behind members of their tribes in the one-party race. It was not that ethnicity was more or less central in either election, for, as the authors made clear, it was highly salient in both. But the specific kinds of ethnic identities that served as bases of electoral competition and as motivations for political support were different.

Obtaining reliable measures of firm creation, survival, and growth is a challenge in any setting but is particularly important and problematic in the transitional countries in East Central Europe. The research reported here is based on a unique dataset prepared jointly with the Research Center for Economic and Statistical Studies of the Polish Central Statistical Office. These data constitute a longitudinal file on the employment, payroll, and sales of firms existing in Poland between 1990 and 1997. This longitudinal dataset is based on the information that firms are required to report to the Central Statistical Office on an annual basis. They have an obvious limitation, however, in that they exclude information on firms that chose not to report or that were not required to report. The first category, those who chose not to report information, covers the so-called gray economy, which was very much in evidence in these countries, although it may be shrinking, in Poland at least (Dzierżanowski, 1999, p. 31). The second category constitutes a more serious concern for this research. In Poland, firms employing five or fewer workers are exempt from filing annual reports with the statistical office. The consequences of this omission could be substantial, as this sector is large, possibly employing as many as 2 million people, and constitutes the critical early stage of the entrepreneurial process. In this extended appendix we want to explore the possible statistical consequences of this omitted information.

The evolution of attitudes about the economy and about who should govern is an integral part of the transitional dynamic in Poland. To integrate the development of Polish attitudes toward various economic and social institutions with our model of the economic evolution, we first consider economic institutions because they affect a wide range of attitudes and perceptions and place substantial constraints on the actions of different political parties. Thus, the Polish transition was based on developing not only a new economic order but also a new set of political institutions and procedures. These political and economic changes are deeply interrelated, and their development and ultimate properties are pieces of a single process. To illustrate this process, we begin with an analysis of two individual attitudes that are central to the Polish political transformation.

Chapter 2 gave a brief description of the political events, and particularly the elections, in Poland since the transition began. Central to these events are the individual's attitudes toward private enterprise and its role in the new Polish economy and about Communism and former Communist officials. This attitude is particularly important as the main opposition to the economic reforms came from parties composed of former Communist officials. This meant that voters who might be opposed to the economic reforms had to vote for a former Communist to express that opposition. Opinions about communism were also likely influenced, in part, by the assessment of the reforms.