Even if Africans wish to make rational decisions about reform, the available choices are far from infinite. Public opinion is forged within a framework of political and economic institutions. Some institutions open up opportunities for individuals to adopt novel attitudes. Churches and trade unions that run civic education programs, for example, may help participants to develop healthy skepticism about the trustworthiness of leaders. And, by reducing the costs of obtaining information, farmer associations may aid agricultural producers in learning about commodity prices and marketing channels. But other institutions foreclose options. A dominant political party may, in the name of loyalty, require its members to stifle their freedom of expression or suspend their critical faculties. Or glutted markets may induce private traders to refuse to purchase farm products at the peak of the season, thus inducing economic dissatisfaction.

Our eyes are open in full recognition that the term “institution” has been abusively overstretched into one of the loosest in the social science lexicon. It has been deployed variously to refer to the rules of the political and economic game (like constitutions and contracts) to organizations that link individuals into larger systems (like bureaucracies and firms) or even to “stable, valued, and recurring patterns of behavior.” Hence, we wish to be explicit about the way we use this contested term. In this chapter, we intentionally employ a narrow definition of institutions as the organizational affiliations and routine behaviors of individual political and economic actors.