South African Parties Hardly Politicise Immigration in Their Electoral Manifestos

ABSTRACT

To what extent do political parties in South Africa politicise immigration? We systematically analyse the party manifestos of all major parties in post-apartheid South Africa, using two separate approaches of content analysis: coding all sentences about immigration individually, and coding the electoral manifesto overall using a ‘checklist’. Although we can expect high politicisation of immigrants in new democracies, most party manifestos do not treat immigration at all. If parties in South Africa treat immigration in their manifestos, they tend to take relatively inclusive positions, focus on immigrant integration rather than immigration control, and use instrumental frames. It appears that the nation-building project of a post-apartheid South Africa has not led to an increased politicisation of immigration by political parties qua parties, although individual politicians certainly play a role.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Bukiwe Tambulu and Sthe Ntlhakana for coding manifestos, Loren Landau, Ingrid Palmary, Jean Pierre Misago, and the two reviewers for helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Didier Ruedin http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5213-4316

Notes

1 All data and replication material will be made available on SocArXiv. Refer to Ruedin and Morales (2017) for extensive validity checks of these methods in the European context.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by nccr - on the move [Grant number 182897].