This chapter lays the foundation for the argument presented in Chapter 5 by accomplishing three tasks. In its first part, the chapter establishes the relevance of ethnicity in post-independence Zambia by showing that ethnic group memberships underlie people's perceptions of how patronage resources are distributed by those who enjoy access to them. I show that, in a context where all politicians promise to distribute jobs and development resources to the people whose votes they are seeking, voters use ethnicity as a cue to help them distinguish promises that are credible from promises that are not. I argue that it is the information that ethnicity is assumed to convey about likely patterns of patronage distribution – not atavism or tradition – that explains why it plays such an important role in Zambian political life.

The second part of the chapter shows how these expectations shape the strategies that politicians, parties, and individual voters employ to construct and secure membership in winning political coalitions. Specifically, I show that, because Zambians assume that having a member of their own ethnic group in a position of power will increase their access to patronage resources, they are inclined to join coalitions led by members of their own ethnic groups, to be sympathetic to electoral appeals couched in ethnic terms, and to be skeptical of promises made by leaders of groups other than their own. I show that, knowing this, politicians and parties appeal to voters' ethnic affiliations in predictable ways.