Choice in Cultural Context: Embedded Rationales for Social Capital Investment in Africa.

This paper considers competing explanations for collective action and social capital formation in post-colonial Africa. It examines social capital formation and collective behavior in three African settings (Senegal, Madagascar, and Malawi) from a rational choice and a cultural-institutional perspective. In each case, we see examples of collective action which lend themselves to rational choice analysis. In each case, we see that a rational choice perspective, in pursuit (as Green and Shapiro have noted, 1994) of the two-headed chimera parsimonious-universalism, generates a stylized, coherent, logically compelling and empirically inaccurate explanation of the means by which actors in post-colonial African settings solve collective action. In each case, we see how an approach rooted in a ?thick? or culturalist approach to institutions provides a more complete explanation for how and why collective action dilemmas are overcome in the cases under study. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]