Finalizing the South African Constitution: The politics of the Constitutional Assembly

Contrary to most accounts, the contentious politics of constitutionmaking in the South African transition to democracy did not end with the critical amendments to the Interim Constitution in April 1994. The argument of this article is that although the deliberations in the Constitutional Assembly (CA) were more constrained by institutional arrangements and pre-election agreements, a number of important decisions on democracy were in fact taken - decisions that are best explained by the internal logic of the CA negotiations.