This paper discusses how competing claims to legitimate political authority are contested at a local level in Zambia. It focuses on three Parliamentary constituencies (one in a densely-populated city, one in a rural setting, and one in a small-town). The research involved mapping the range of actors found contesting public authority in each constituency, process tracing local controversies, election observation, media ethnographies and a survey. It analyses everyday contests over the rights and duties of representatives in order to identify the contours of any ‘social contract’.
The relevant actors include most prominently elected constituency MPs, but they work with/around provincial representatives of central government agencies; district-level civil servants; ward-level councillors; residents’ and traders’ representatives; traditional chiefs; NGO workers; party political structures; participants in local radio talk-shows; and religious figures. The paper analyses how these various figures deploy mediatised performance to make claims to speak for the people, to seek credit for development projects, votes, and public professions of loyalty, and to navigate accusation of failure to deliver these goods.
It understands variations in the language and theatre of politics in relation to patterns of sedimentation of the rules and norms of constituency politics. These result from, amongst other factors: successive waves of decentralisation reforms; post-socialist legacies of ‘one party participatory democracy’; the re-introduction of participatory national development planning processes in the early 2000s; and the ever-more competitive and partisan character of electoral politics in the last decade. These processes have thrown up a dizzying array of local committees, planning processes and channels for the distribution of resources and the regulation of economic and social activities. While these formally embody varying rules about who in the constituency rightly make decisions and how they might be held accountable, some actors seem more capable than others of leveraging influence across these realms and thus having their claims to legitimate authority respected.