The Institutionalisation of Political Power

D.N Posner and D.J Young contend in a paper at the Journal of Democracy that:

That African politics needs to be viewed through a lens that recognises the formal constraints on executives and rejects the assumption that African leaders simply get what they want...Citing a series of recent cases in which African rulers are forced to accept something other than their preferred outcomes, the authors say that across sub-Saharan Africa, formal institutional rules are coming to matter much more than they used to and displace violence as the primary source of constraints on executive behaviour.