TL;DRAbstract
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.
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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.
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