Systematic, Quantitative Political Science in South Africa: the Road Less Travelled

Abstract

While it has clearly been a minority tendency within the discipline, there is a significant tradition of systematic, quantitative research on South African society, politics, and democracy that has contributed a great deal to our understanding of these issues. Yet much of this research has actually been carried out by South African psychologists and sociologists, not political scientists. And amongst the political scientists, a great deal of the work has been done by scholars located outside the country, or by non-South Africans located at South African universities. Very little of it is done by local political scientists, and even less by black South Africans.

Notes

1 Gibson and Gouws's (2003) book on intolerance won the Alexander L. George Book Award for the best book published in the field of political psychology in 2003 from the International Society of Political Psychology. Gibson's (2004) book on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission won the 2004 Best Book Award, from the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. And Michael Bratton, Robert Mattes and E. Gyimah-Boadi won the 2004 Comparative Politics Section of the American Political Science Association's Lipset/Przeworski/Verba Data Set Award for the Afrobarometer, which was the basis for their 2005 book.