African Politics and the Strategic Use of Ethnic Identity

Extract

In past studies of African politics, a great deal of attention has focused on the role of ethnic conflicts as a root cause of political violence. Daniel Posner, in Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa, takes a different approach by examining variations in ethnic identities and nonviolent policy choices. Specifically, he asks several important questions about when and why individuals in postindependent Zambia identify themselves as either members of a particular tribe or a broader national language group when they make voting decisions. Posner builds upon past research that has demonstrated that ethnic identity is best viewed as a fluid concept that changes in response to shifts in the relevant social and political context (Mitchell 1956; Epstein 1958; Barth 1969). He also draws on a rich body of past field research in Africa, along with his own field studies and analyses of aggregate data from Zambia.

What makes Posner's case study of a single African nation-state of potential interest to a wider audience than African scholars is the fact that he attempts to use past theoretical and empirical work on voting behavior. In particular, he uses William Riker's (1962) concept of a minimum winning coalition to explain when and why Zambian voters are likely to emphasize tribalism over their broader language identity. Posner also relies upon past research on social learning and institutional change to develop a framework to predict ethnic identity choices (Lipset and Rokkan 1967; Laitin 1986).