In 2002 the victory of Mwai Kibaki and his National Rainbow Coalition (NaRC) over the incumbent Kenya African National Union was widely expected to usher in a period of political reform and economic prosperity (Wolf et al. 2004). Both international and domestic actors expected the Kibaki regime to curb corruption, show greater respect for political rights and civil liberties, and reform Kenya's over-centralised political institutions. According to opinion polls, in early 2003 Kenyans were the most optimistic people on earth (Gallup International 2002). Just fifteen months later, optimism about the future had plummeted, as a direct result of the failure of Kibaki and NaRC to break away from what David Bartlett (2000) has called ‘older political logics’. As in Zambia and elsewhere in Africa, the removal of the dominant party of the post-independence period has not yet resulted in a radical change in the way politics is conducted.

The continued reproduction of the dominant institutions of the one-party era explains the limited nature of Kenya's democratic transition. The most significant formal institution has been the ‘bureaucratic-executive’ state, in which power is concentrated in the President and exercised through a prefectural structure of provincial administration. The strength of this executive-administrative axis has conferred great coercive capacity on the executive and limited the political space available to opposition leaders and movements. Despite this, some formal ‘civil society’ organisations, most notably the National Christian Council of Kenya and the Law Society of Kenya, proved able to mobilise their resources to protect targets of government aggression and promote democratic reform.