The Era of Ineluctability? Post-Apartheid South Africa After 20 Years of Democratic Elections

Electoral research in post-apartheid South Africa was initially dominated by those advocating a variously racial-cum-ethnic census approach, later challenged by analysts who argued for less race-reductionist models of understanding voting behaviour. The core of the ‘racial census’ approach was to question the possibility of democracy finding genuine purchase where victory for the party of liberation was assured because black majoritarianism was blind to corruption, ineptitude or worse, and open only to race. The innate pessimism about South African democracy, which this perspective introduced, has deepened, notably after the recall of President Mbeki and the subsequent installation of President Zuma. After 20 years of democracy, many commentators have written off the ruling African National Congress (ANC) as corrupt, inept, authoritarian and set on a path of decline that will drag South Africa inexorably towards becoming ‘the next Zimbabwe’. This was the core narrative that informed attacks on the ANC by opposition parties in the election of May 2014. However, a more nuanced set of arguments is emerging, which asserts that the ANC, and South Africa, are not on an ineluctable path to collapse and failure. This article analyses these competing narratives, and the archetypes from which they derive. However, it argues that a deeper, more complex challenge is facing South African democracy. Using empirical voter behaviour data, generated, inter alia, via commingling census and official voting-district-level data on registration and turn-out, the article shows that voting-age people from the poorest deciles have stopped registering and/or voting in significant and growing numbers since 2004, that the electorate increasingly comprises the better-off, and suggests that these trends should be focal areas for those concerned with South African democracy: political pluralism at the expense of the poor seems to be a very high price to pay.