THE ROLE OF THE ETHNIC INTERMEDIARY IN THE POLITICAL PROCESS
Keeping in mind that ethnicity, language, subregion, and socioeconomic class can all overlap in various contexts, I will nonetheless focus upon the way that political elites make use of ethnicity to advance their own selfinterests, as well as those of their ethnic constituents.
Ethnic leaders who maintain close ties with the mostly urban ruling elite have interests and lifestyles that diverge from those of their constituents. Because rural clients depend heavily on their representatives to put forward their claims to those in positions of power, they have little choice but to give their patrons wide discretion in the way they advance their demands at the political center. The effect is to create a gap between the ethnic constituency’s demands for change and the political entrepreneur’s selection and shaping of these demands before channeling them to high-level decisionmakers (Rothchild 1983: 184). The ethnic entrepreneur has considerable, but not total, latitude in determining which demands to present. If an entrepreneur’s choice of claims masks his or her class privileges without taking adequate account of client concerns, that person may well find it difficult to maintain constituent support at election time (Hyden and Leys 1972,401).Ethnic entrepreneurs make use of the classic tactics of interest group representatives the world over when pressing their claims for security and material resources upon subregional or central authorities. These ethnic elites vary enormously in terms of influence, access, and types of relationship with state officials and other interest group representatives. They are active in all types of political regime situations: democratic or polyarchical, elite power sharing, and hegemonic. Ethnic spokespersons operate for the most part out of public view and use a variety of formal and informal channels—contacts with politicians and bureaucrats, support for sympathetic parties and candidates, pressure on legislators, logrolling, alliances, and threats of noncooperation and noncompliance—to influence decision-making elites to act positively on their demands. Thus, ethnicity, like socioeconomic class, has proved to be a state- linked category that involves various claims by ethnic intermediaries for state-controlled political and economic resources.
Elites can manipulate ethnic symbols and mobilize their communities for political action precisely because the ethnic group is a base around which the communal membership can unite to attempt to secure satisfaction for their human needs. The ethnic group is indeed a recent social construct, but it has nonetheless developed into a meaningful contemporary vehicle for organizing group members and competing for scarce state-controlled resources. On this, Alex de Waal (1994, 3-4) says: “To argue that the [ethnic groups] thus manufactured are artificial is to miss the point.... it is impossible to interpret recent events without recourse to [ethnic] labels, and they are the labels used by the people themselves.” Ethnic group participation in the dynamic struggle over power and scarce resources reflects the political imperatives of the times and cannot be wished away by the exhortations of rulers. As Abner Cohen (1969, 190) states: African ethnicity is “basically a political and not a cultural phenomenon, and it operates within contemporary political contexts and is not an archaic survival arrangement carried over into the present by conservative people.” Whether mythical or real, then, as long as political elites can manipulate ethnic loyalties to promote collective purposes, such groups can be expected to play significant roles in advancing what are perceived to be the particular interests of the patrons and the common interests of their memberships.