Measuring Political Change: The Quantity and Effectiveness of Electoral and Party Participation in the Zambian One-Party State, 1973–91

The introduction of a ‘one-party participatory democracy’ in Zambia in 1973 under the United National Independence Party (UNIP) of President Kenneth Kaunda made significant changes in the nature and extent of political participation, regime structure and public policy in that country. Among a number of constitutional changes, the proscription of the opposition parties – African National Congress (ANC) and United Progressive Party (UPP) – was probably the most important. There is a relatively extensive literature describing these changes and evaluating their significance. A number of further changes which affected these political variables in varying degrees occurred during the life of the one-party system, which lasted until 1991, but much less has been written about these changes, at least in part because they have been assumed to be insignificant. This Note describes the collection of a systematic events dataset on changes in electoral and political party participation (including changes in policies towards participation and changes in party structures affecting participation), regime structure (including party–government relations, central government structure and central–local government relations), and policies affecting the economy, class structure and culture in Zambia from 1973 through 1985. It then describes the use of expert judges to scale events in the dataset and evaluate their cumulative significance for dimensions of change delineated by the investigator or themselves. Finally, it presents one substantive application of this methodology: specification of the overall directions and extent of change in electoral and party participation under the one-party system. Two contradictory directions of change not so far identified in the literature on the Zambian one-party state are uncovered. It is suggested that changes in the one-party state helped to undermine its support, even among some of those Zambians who initially believed in it.