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.

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.