In the popular mind, ethnic conflict in Africa invariably revolves around deep-seated tribal identities and rivalries. Unfortunately, this perspective ignores the fact that Africans, like people everywhere, have multiple group identities. Although Daniel Posner singles out tribal affiliations as an important source of ethnic cleavage in Africa, he sees ethnicity as also including group identities based on race, clan, region, language, and religion. While much of the book provides a meticulous examination of the evolution of ethnic cleavage structures and ethnic politics in one African country, Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa, as the title indicates, is far more than a detailed case study of Zambia, a former British colony known as Northern Rhodesia before independence. It is also a splendid primer as to how to systematically apply institutional analysis to explain political behavior.
In his introductory chapter, Posner argues that individuals have multiple and shifting group identities that are situational and strategic and affected by the institutional context in which they operate. His book strives to show how institutions—that is, rules, regulations, and policies—not only shape the repertoire of potentially mobilizable ethnic identities but also people's incentives to choose one group identity over another (p. 2). Unlike many studies that focus on the causes of ethnic conflict or why ethnicity is politically useful, Posner seeks to explain why ethnic conflicts and competition break out along one line of ethnic division rather than another.
Like Robert Bates, his former mentor, Posner analyzes ethnic groups as coalitions that have been formed as part of rational efforts to secure benefits. These coalitions are based on three propositions: (a) People want resources from the state; (b) they believe that having someone in their ethnic group in a position of power will facilitate their access to these resources; and (c) they believe that the best way to get one of their own in power is to build or join a coalition with their group members.
Using institutional analysis, the author shows how colonial institutions set up by the British created incentives for individuals in Northern Rhodesia to invest in tribal identities. Precolonial tribal identities thus became stronger in areas that had strong chiefs and “Native Authority” institutions, while they became weaker in areas where tribes had no Native Authority of their own. Colonial policies also determined the relative size and physical location of Zambia's more than 70 tribes by establishing fixed administrative boundaries for Native Authorities.
Colonial educational policies provided institutional incentives for Zambians to invest in four major regional linguistic groups, Bemba, Nyanja, Tonga, and Lozi, down from the more than 50 tribal languages spoken before the advent of colonial rule. In selecting only four African languages to be used for instruction in primary schools, colonial educational institutions thus insured their dominant position in the areas where they were used and created new ethnic identities based on language.
By independence, tribal and linguistic identities had become the two most salient ones for most Zambians. Having demonstrated how these ethnic identities emerged, Posner then goes on to explain how regime changes and electoral rules shaped ethnic politics, cleavages, and coalition building in postindependent Zambia. Marshaling impressive evidence, he argues that political conflict in competitive one-party regimes governed by single-member plurality (SMP) electoral rules will revolve primarily around constituency-level ethnic cleavages. On the other hand, in a competitive multiparty system, where the arena of political competition is the entire country and where voters select the president as well as their constituency-level representatives, political conflicts will revolve around the broader category of ethnic groups that divide the nation. In Zambia, constituency-level politics centered around smaller tribal identities, while at the national level, ethnic politics centered around larger linguistic identities as politicians played the linguistic card, rather than the tribal card, because of their need to build a larger coalition.
The last part of the book asks whether the modes of institutional analysis used in the Zambian case can be applied elsewhere in Africa and beyond Africa. Posner admits that institutional arrangements comparable to those found in Zambia—that is, SMP districts and regime shifts from competitive one-party to multiparty regimes—can be found only in Sierra Leone, Kenya, and Tanzania. The analysis works splendidly for Kenya, fairly well for Sierra Leone, but not so well for Tanzania where tribal identities are not terribly salient. Insufficient competitive elections, lack of regime changes, different electoral rules, high levels of urbanization, and federal systems all reflect different kinds of institutional arrangements that lead to different outcomes from those found in Zambia. These institutional differences, however, do not negate Posner's basic argument; they merely point to the need to see how institutional differences play out in different political settings and contexts.
The book's final chapter is a tour de force in its brilliant use of different examples drawn from India, Nigeria, Zaire, Ireland, Moldava, and the United States to show how different kinds of institutional arrangements shape identity choices and ethnic coalitions differently, and why the boundaries of political systems are one of the key determinants of context in which ethnic identities and coalitions are formed. Here, Posner goes beyond regime changes and provides short but telling cases studies that illustrate how federal regimes and changes in the franchise affect and shape the choice of ethnic identities.
One of the rare shortcomings in the book is the paucity of references to institutional arrangements in African countries not formerly under British colonial rule. Tribal identities do not mean much in highly urbanized countries like Senegal where religion, region, and language are far more important than tribe and clan and where urban neighborhoods and political parties are multiethnic. Posner also has little to say about class and under what conditions class becomes an important element of group identity. Despite these caveats, his book remains a splendid piece of work that merits being widely read by political scientists of all stripes because of its successful integration of institutional analysis, area studies, and qualitative and quantitative methodologies.
