The last centuries before the European invasions were marked by the rise of an immense conquest state in the Andes, that of the Inca and a smaller series of warring kingdoms, the Muisca, on the Sabana de Bogotá and the large and equally warring kingdoms or chiefdoms of the Tupinamba in eastern Brazil. The range of difference between these kingdoms (and empire) is significant but all were marked by a bellicose orientation and, in the case of the Tupinamba, by ritual cannibalism.

Iconographic studies of pictorial art are important clues to belief systems in non-literate societies. In South America intensive study of the pictorial Moche style has led to a new understanding of its religious practices, while in the north studies of a number of metallurgical styles have shown belief systems concerning shamanism and the importance of carnivores in mythology.

It is usually a mistake to suppose that a company is the best judge of how its business works.1 Or that an industry is the best judge of how the industry works. AT&T is a good example. When the Justice Department sat down with management in 1981 to negotiate a breakup of what was then a monopoly provider of telephone service, government lawyers asked which part of the company management wanted to keep after the breakup – the long-distance operations or the regional networks.2 The long-distance operations had long been the company’s most profitable, so management asked for those.3

The murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police over Memorial Day weekend ignited sustained protests across the country and placed the issue of race front and center. As we show in this chapter, by September, more than two-thirds of our survey respondents report positive views of the Black Lives Matter movement. While the salience of race began to fade as the general election campaign unfolded, we find that political characteristics of citizens, such as party attachment and partisan media exposure, influence support for the social justice movement and support for law enforcement. Further, psychological predispositions consistently and significantly influence views of social protests and policing. For example, people’s level of racial resentment produces powerful changes in their views of the protests and police from September to October. Finally, attitudes about racial justice and policing influence overall impressions of Biden and Trump, producing significant changes in people’s views of the candidates during the first months of the fall campaign.

Media have traditionally relied on a mix of advertising and subscription revenue to keep the lights on – and to produce a mix of high-quality, thoughtful, well researched, compelling news, information, educational, and other content that is necessary in a modern democracy. The internet has disrupted those revenue streams. And while some media outlets have shored themselves up on other sources of support – grants, government transfers and licensing fees, wealthy patrons, or the like – such funding is both the exception and de minimis in the overall operation of our media ecosystem.

Trust in media institutions has declined more or less apace with trust in every other kind of major institution in public life. Or perhaps it is more correct, as Ashutosh Bhagwat observes in his contribution to this project, to say that trust has declined in the types of media institutions, the proverbial Walter Cronkites, that dominated “the media” during the twentieth-century period when modern American ideals around free speech and journalistic value were still taking form.

BETWEEN 2001 and 2011, the governing Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD), under the party and national presidencies of Levy Mwanawasa (2002–2008) and Rupiah Banda (2009–2011), and the opposition Patriotic Front (PF) led by Michael Sata dominated Zambian politics. Mwanawasa was sworn in as president on 2 January 2002 after a narrow win against Anderson Mazoka of the opposition United Party for National Development (UPND). He polled 28.69 per cent of the total vote, defeating Mazoka, who obtained 27.76 per cent, and nine other presidential candidates, including Sata who gained only 3 per cent. Of the total 150 seats in parliament, the MMD won 69, followed by the UPND (49), United National Independence Party (UNIP) (13), Forum for Democracy and Development (FDD) (12), and Heritage Party (HP) (4). Like Ben Mwila's Zambia Republican Party (ZRP), Sata's PF obtained only one seat. This tally is striking since, five years later in the 2006 general elections, Sata only lost to Mwanawasa, who polled 42.98 per cent, by a 13.61 per cent margin. The PF captured forty-three seats in parliament and rose to become the largest parliamentary opposition, dislodging the UPND.

After President Mwanawasa died in office, a presidential by-election was held in October 2008, and despite having insufficient time and financial resources to mount a credible and effective campaign, Sata lost narrowly by 2 per cent to the MMD candidate, Banda, who gained 40 per cent of the total vote. In September 2011, during the country's general and presidential elections, Sata, making a fourth try for the presidency, secured the seat with 42.24 per cent of the total ballot, defeating the incumbent Banda, who got 35.63 per cent. In this election, Sata's PF did strikingly well, winning sixty seats in parliament, the most of any rival political party. Although parties do tend to be younger in Africa than in many other parts of the world, the PF's rise from 3 to 42 per cent of the popular vote over a ten-year-period is unusual. It is this remarkable rise of an opposition party and a leader's efforts to build it that I explore in this and the next chapter. The present chapter examines Sata's rise from 2001 to 2006. The subsequent period, 2006 to 2011, is covered in the following chapter.

THE PRE-EMINENT political force in Zambian society from independence in 1964 to 1991 was the United National Independence Party (UNIP) led by its founder, President Kenneth Kaunda. UNIP's dominance of national politics was first highlighted in two competitive multi-party elections: one at the close of the colonial period in January 1964 when the party won an outright majority, and the other in 1968 when it increased its support across the country. UNIP consolidated its political hegemony in December 1972 when Kaunda declared Zambia a one-party state. This declaration ushered in a second and longer phase of UNIP's formal grip on power that ended only in 1991 when a popular uprising, spearheaded by a newly formed opposition party named the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD), saw the reintroduction of multi-party politics and the subsequent defeat of Kaunda and his nationalist movement.

It should not be assumed that the one-party state was monolithic. General elections, which were competitive especially at parliamentary level, were held in 1973, 1978, 1983, and 1988. The first two of these have been the subject of detailed research by scholars of Zambian political history. The latter two, in contrast, have not, and are important because they took place after UNIP removed the unpopular restriction that had previously limited the number of candidates who could run for election to the National Assembly to three per constituency. In instances where there were more than three prospective candidates in a constituency, primary elections were held to determine the finalists. Although prospective candidates still had to apply to the party's Central Committee for adoption, the abolition of the primary elections paved the way for greater voter choice and more open electoral contests. Studying electoral contests in this greatly altered political environment can yield significant insights into our understanding of the workings of one-party participatory democracy.

Moreover, the 1983 and 1988 elections are of particular interest to this chapter because they occurred after Sata, who went on to become one of the key political actors in the one-party state until its demise, made his formal entry into Zambian mainstream politics in 1981. He ran for parliamentary office in both elections, defeating nine other contestants including an incumbent Member of Parliament (MP) in the first election before being re-elected five years later.