The Decline of Partisan Voting and the Rise in Electoral Uncertainty in South Africa’s 2019 General Elections

ABSTRACT

South Africa’s democratic elections have produced highly stable and predictable outcomes, largely as a result of the slow pace of change in partisanship. However, a sudden decline in partisanship in the years before the 2019 General Elections was likely to have obvious and predictable effects on electoral behaviour. This article contends that the shrinkage in partisan loyalties manifested in a number of ways, notably through the poor performances of the two largest parties, higher abstentions, individual level vote shifts, vote splitting, and later-than-usual vote decisions. The decline in partisan loyalties also prompted a shift in the voter calculus, with many more voters preoccupied with the campaign and short-term party performance, issue and candidate evaluations, and far fewer with long-standing, traditional party loyalties. The overall effect of weakening partisanship increased the fluidity of voting behaviour and, in turn, increased the unpredictability of the 2019 electoral outcome.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Collette Schulz-Herzenberg http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6039-801X

Notes

1 The author sincerely thanks Citizen Surveys for the use of the South African Citizen Survey (SACS) dataset and report, and especially to Reza Omar for his assistance with the data. The SACS has been carried out since 2015. Face-to-face interviews are conducted with a nationally representative, multi-stage, stratified probability sample of 3,900 adult South African respondents on a quarterly basis. See South African Citizens Survey: Core Report, Quarter 1, 2019.

2 The correlation has a significant and moderate effect. Cramer’s V: .127***

3 The VAP data used in this study can also be understood as the voting eligible population (or VEP) because all non-citizens and foreign nationals were removed from the data by Statistics South Africa.

4 The Comparative National Elections Project (CNEP) is a multi-national project that studies political communication and social structure within the context of election campaigns using compatible research designs and a common core of survey questions. See https://u.osu.edu/cnep/. The South African surveys were conducted nationally following the 2004, 09, and 14 elections and includes 1,300 personal interviews. The samples were drawn using multi-stage, stratified, area cluster, probability sampling.