Introduction

For more than a decade after the toppling of President Traoré in 1991, scholars of Mali portrayed the Malian transition to multiparty democracy as a watershed event that marked a departure from a highly centralized and authoritarian single-party system to one granting room for public debate, associational life, and other forms of civil society participation (e.g. Bingen et al. 2000; Bratton et al. 2002; Wing 2008; Baudais 2016; see Schulz 2012: ch. 1). Stressing the legitimacy-enhancing effects of these institutional transformations, authors tended to take the actions and demands of an educated segment of Mali's urban populations as representative of ‘widespread political will’ and of the perceptions of ‘many Malian citizens’ (Wing and Kassibo 2014: 113; see also Bratton et al. 2002; Hetland 2007: 96–7; Wing 2008: 3, 6, 79). Against such sweeping generalizations about Malian popular opinion, and optimistic views on how swiftly institutional reform might bring about a change in people's constructions of political legitimacy, this chapter probes whether constitutional and institutional changes introduced in Mali in the 1990s did indeed prompt substantial transformations first, in popular perceptions of the legitimacy of the political system and its key representatives; and second, in the rationale and forms of political decision making, influence taking, and control.

The forms and nature of political practice in Africa have been a favourite subject of political and social science scholarship on Africa. In an effort to decide whether one can speak of a specific character in African politics (Médard 1982) or of ‘the African state’ (Bayart et al. 1997; Mbembe 1992a, b), authors have examined what rationale informs the actions of state officials and those who solicit the services of the state bureaucracy, or alternatively seek to evade its regulatory efforts. The results of these analyses have remained somewhat inconclusive, as authors have generated different, sometimes even opposed typologies of ‘the African state’ and ‘politics in Africa’ (see Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 2014).