Does Democratization Lead to the Reduction of Economic Inequality? The Case of the Welfare State in Post-apartheid South Africa

While the neo-institutional literature on democratic transition anddemocratic consolidation tend to answer positively to the question, the temporal linkbetween the Third Wave of democratization and the take-off of economic globalization,associated with the increase of inequality in the Global South and the retrenchmentof the welfare state in the West, cast some doubts on such conventional wisdomand raises questions on the linkage between civil-political citizenship and economiccitizenship in the current world.The paper describes the social policies adopted to address inequality in postapartheidSouth Africa and the political debate on the mismatch between goals andoutcomes after more than 15 years of democratic regime. It appears that, while racialpolarization has been significantly reduced, the distributional regime introduced afterdemocratisation has left the high levels of economic polarisation inherited from theapartheid years largely intact.It as argued that, as suggested by comparative-historical scholarship on welfarestate-building in the West, the advent of economic citizenship requires the formationof particular political class-coalitions in addition to the introduction of democraticinstitutions. In today's world, the influence of international markets and institutionson policy options available to the political decision-makers in the peripheral and semi-peripheral areas of the world economy is so strong that the analysis of «domestic»coalition-making should be conducted across the divide between the national and theinternational arenas. From this perspective, it seems that conditions for the rise of aradical redistributive coalition in South Africa do not exist at the moment.