Interpreting the meaning of political structures and processes is an enterprise distinct from the attempt to give causal explanations for political outcomes. It is not, however, irrelevant to the latter enterprise. Even if one supposed that the only thing worth knowing about politics was what was likely to happen in specific conditions, it is hard to know how one could begin to select promising materials for deriving such expectations except from a political world which was already fairly elaborately interpreted. This paper is an attempt to interpret differences between the politics of Ghana and those of Sri Lanka in terms of the social basis of political allegiance. It deliberately sacrifices the selection of a neat set of explananda in pursuit of what is intended, perhaps optimistically, to be a greater evaluative richness.

It is helpful to begin by conceiving of both representation and obligation as ideological categories. Allegiance by contrast may be seen, at least for the moment, as a social fact, though one of indeterminate scope. States and citizenship, in the world as it now is, we have everywhere with us. State ideologies are almost everywhere ostensibly democratic (hence the near omnipresence of citizenship) and state pretensions to authority correspondingly overweening (if we are for the people, who among our citizens can possibly be against us?).