By comparing the educational attainment of Kenyans whose years of primary schooling did and did not correspond with the tenure in office of a president from their own ethnic group, we provide evidence suggesting that Kenyan presidents have favored their coethnics in the allocation of educational resources. We discuss the implications of such bias, emphasizing that the main impact is to reinforce perceptions of ethnic favoritism in government allocation decisions that, in turn, fosters resentment across group lines, undermines trust in government, and raises the stakes of elections. We suggest that protecting education from ethnic politics might be achieved by three means: devolution, which may limit executive power and discretion over the distribution of resources; fostering public awareness and social mobilization in favor of more equity in the education sector; or the promotion of private schools as an alternative to the state-sponsored educational sector.

If institutions are rules that restrain political actors, then the most important institutions that constrain the most important political actors are the rules that tell presidents how and when they must relinquish power. The most significant of these are the constitutional provisions that restrict presidents to two terms in office. Since 1990, such term limits have been put in place in all but seven of the forty-seven countries in sub-Saharan Africa that have non-ceremonial heads of state. This chapter explores how African leaders have responded to these limits. Our findings suggest that these constitutional checks on presidential power are real and that they have come to constrain African leaders in ways that were almost unimaginable in earlier eras.

In the first decades after independence from European colonial rule, African leaders were rightly depicted as ‘big men’, unconstrained by the rules that formally limited their power (Jackson and Rosberg 1982; Chabal and Daloz 1999; Hyden 2006). Authority in this era stemmed from a combination of military might, intimidation and the command of informal networks. Leaders entered and exited office not through elections or other regular means but primarily through the barrel of a gun. In this era, it was almost unthinkable that a head of state would relinquish power simply because a clause in the constitution said that he must. Much more likely, he would ignore the provision and simply declare himself (or have the legislature he controlled declare him) ‘President for Life’ – as Kwame Nkrumah did in 1964, Hastings Banda did in 1970, Jean-Bédel Bokassa and Francisco Macías Nguema did in 1972 and Idi Amin did in 1976. Many other African leaders effectively did the same, even if they never adopted the formal title.

But by the 1990s, things began to change. The modal means by which African leaders surrendered power shifted from coup d’état to voluntary resignation, either due to term limits or following a defeat in a relatively free and fair election. Political power also became much more institutionalised during the intervals between elections. Although not every African country during this period moved towards greater constraints on executive authority, the overall shift in this direction was discernible. Across the continent, the unfettered ‘personal rule’ that had previously characterised the politics of the region began to be displaced by a more rule-bound, institutionalised political order.

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.

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.

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.

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.