Racial animosity and political party partisanship in South Africa: the case of the African National Congress and the Black African majority

ABSTRACT

As it is in many countries, racial rhetoric is a feature of South African national government elections. The use of such rhetoric provokes the question, how much is political party support in the country driven by interracial animosities? Using the nationally representative public opinion dataset, the South African Social Attitudes Survey, this article looks at party closeness to the African National Congress (ANC) amongst the black African population. The ANC is one of the oldest and most powerful political parties on the African continent and currently dominates South Africa’s parliamentary government. Constructing four indexes of racial attitudes and behaviours, the article investigates whether partisanship with the ruling party can be predicted by racial animosity. The period under investigation is 2010–2014. Bivariate and multivariate quantitative techniques are employed to test the relationship between ANC partisanship and racial animosity. The results of this investigation show that racial enmity in the country is troublingly widespread. Public opinion analysis, however, found no correlation between racial acrimony and ANC partisanship. Other factors are driving black African identification with the country’s ruling party. The implications of these results for the study for political party support in South Africa are discussed and future avenues of research presented.

KEYWORDS:

• South Africa
• African National Congress
• racial prejudice
• interracial contact
• political partisanship

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the Coordinators of the Democracy Governance & Service Delivery research programme, Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) for their cooperation and support during the writing of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Steven Lawrence Gordon http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6393-2118

Notes

1 In 1898 the South African Native Congress was established and would form the nucleus of the South African Native National Congress which was formed in 1912 and would be rebranded the African National Congress in 1923. The organization operated legally until 1960 when the party was declared illegal under the terms of the apartheid Unlawful Organisations Act (No. 34 of 1960). The ANC was unbanned in 1990. A comprehensive history of the organization pre- and post-1994 is provided by Booysen, The African National Congress and the Regeneration of Political Power.

2 The term “racial census” thesis comes from a 1999 study by Giliomee and Simkins (cited in Everatt, “The Era of Ineluctability?,” 51) on the establishment of parliamentary opposition in South Africa. The thesis refers to the supposition that voters in the country identify political parties in racial terms and vote for the party that represents their race group. The thesis has been used to argue that since the ANC is thought to represent the black African majority, the party will continue to command the vote of that majority. Ferree, Framing the Race in South Africa, presents a wide-ranging discussion of the “racial census” thesis and its history.

3 See, for instance, Mattes and Piombo, “Opposition Parties and the Voters in South Africa’s General Election of 1999”; Mclaughlin, “Racial, Ethnic or Rational Voters?”; Macdonald, “Racial Politics and Campaign Strategy in South Africa’s 2009 Election”; Habib and Herzenberg, “Democratization and Parliamentary Opposition in Contemporary South Africa.”

4 See, for example, Norris, Radical Right; Huddy and Feldman, “On Assessing the Political Effects of Racial Prejudice”; Hajnal and Rivera, “Immigration, Latinos, and White Partisan Politics”; Tope, Pickett, and Chiricos, “Anti-Minority Attitudes and Tea Party Movement Membership.”

5 Mattes, “Systematic, Quantitative Political Science in South Africa.”

6 Ajzen and Fishbein, “The Influence of Attitudes on Behaviour.”

7 Fishbein, Peer Prejudice.

8 Bartels, “Partisanship and Voting Behaviour, 1952–1996,” looks at the robust relationship between voting behaviour and partisanship in the United States. Bartle and Bellucci, Political Parties and Partisanship, reviews the behavioural consequences of partisanship in both new and established democracies.

9 Norris, Electoral Engineering.

10 Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict.

11 Posner, Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa.

12 Eifert, Miguel, and Posner, “Political Competition and Ethnic Identification in Africa.”

13 For further discussion of ethnonational politics in sub-Saharan Africa see Elischer, Political Parties in Africa, which scrutinizes the influence of ethnic identity on party politics.

14 See, for instance, Huddy and Feldman, “On Assessing the Political Effects of Racial Prejudice”; Hajnal and Rivera, “Immigration, Latinos, and White Partisan Politics.”

15 Bartle and Bellucci, Political Parties and Partisanship; Tope, Pickett, and Chiricos, “Anti-Minority Attitudes and Tea Party Movement Membership.”

16 Booysen, The African National Congress and the Regeneration of Political Power.

17 Gibson and Claassen, “Racial Reconciliation in South Africa.”

18 White and Ballard, “Changing Racial Segregation in the New South Africa.”

19 For a discussion of the prejudice-contact relationship, see Pettigrew and Tropp, “Allport’s Intergroup Contact Hypothesis.”

20 Davis, “Proportional Representation and Racial Campaigning in South Africa.”

21 Ferree, Framing the Race in South Africa.

22 Macdonald, “Racial Politics and Campaign Strategy in South Africa’s 2009 Election.”

23 Ferree, Framing the Race in South Africa.

24 Mattes and Piombo, “Opposition Parties and the Voters in South Africa’s General Election of 1999”; Mattes, “Voter Information, Government Evaluations, and Party Images in the First Democratic Decade”; Mclaughlin, “Racial, Ethnic or Rational Voters?”; Habib and Herzenberg, “Democratization and Parliamentary Opposition in Contemporary South Africa.”

25 Everatt, “The Era of Ineluctability?”

26 Mattes, “Voter Information, Government Evaluations, and Party Images in the First Democratic Decade.”

27 Macdonald, “Racial Politics and Campaign Strategy in South Africa’s 2009 Election.”

28 Voter turnout as a proportion of the age-eligible population in South Africa has declined over time. For a discussion of this decline, see Schulz-Herzenberg, “Trends in Electoral Participation, 1994–2014.” Analysis of official dataset by Everatt, “The Era of Ineluctability?” suggests that the poor are less likely than their more affluent counterparts to register or to vote. He found that low-income households’ electoral participation has declined since 2004. This evidence would suggest that focusing only on electoral behaviour obscures our understanding of political partisanship amongst non-voters, particularly the poor.

29 Bartle and Bellucci, Political Parties and Partisanship, provide an examination of the conceptualizations, causes, and consequences of partisanship.

30 This survey was designed to be nationally representative and contains a sample of 500 areas stratified by province, geographical sub-type, and majority race group. Individuals aged 16 and older were interviewed in households which are geographically spread across the country’s nine provinces. The survey has been conducted annually since 2003 and the sample size for each survey round was roughly between 3,000 and 3,500. Data are weighted to be nationally representative of the country’s adult population. The questionnaire was translated into the country’s major languages and interviews, when possible, were conducted in the respondents’ home language.

31 In a country like South Africa, social interactions are likely to be informed by the race of the interviewer and the language of the interview. In a public opinion study of 14 African countries, Adida et al., “Who’s Asking?,” found that respondents’ answers were shaped by whether their interviewer belonged to their population group. This may be especially true if the interview contained questions on race relations.

32 These items are based on those used by Michigan scholars in public opinion surveys on political behaviour. Barnes et al., “Party Identification and Party Closeness in Comparative Perspective,” demonstrated that these items are superior to survey items on political identification.

33 Ferree, Framing the Race in South Africa; Schulz-Herzenberg, “Trends in Electoral Participation, 1994–2014”; Everatt, “The Era of Ineluctability?”

34 Such as Gibson and Claassen, “Racial Reconciliation in South Africa.”

35 A respondent’s access to services and ownership of assets was established using 30 questions. Because responses from these questions are used to discern economic status in a South African context, the questions were designed specifically for the South African environment. These are combined to produce the 0–10 Living Standard Measurement. The higher the score on this indicator, the higher the respondent’s standard of living.

36 It could be argued that this is an empirical artefact related to including multiple measures of racial animosity in the same model, which would suggest multicollinearity problems. To test for this problem, I constructed a model to measure the effect of each of the indexes included as independent variables. The patterning of results observed from these multiple regression models did not lead me to change my conclusion that racial animosity is a poor predictor of partisan support for the ruling party in South Africa.

37 Consider, for example, the work of Mattes and Piombo, “Opposition Parties and the Voters in South Africa’s General Election of 1999”; Mclaughlin, “Racial, Ethnic or Rational Voters?”; Habib and Herzenberg, “Democratization and Parliamentary Opposition in Contemporary South Africa.”

38 Schulz-Herzenberg, “The Influence of the Social Context on South African Voters.”

39 Evidence for this thesis is provided by Huddy and Feldman, “On Assessing the Political Effects of Racial Prejudice”; Tope, Pickett, and Chiricos, “Anti-Minority Attitudes and Tea Party Movement Membership.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Steven Lawrence Gordon

Steven Gordon is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Democracy Governance and Service Delivery research programme, Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC). He has been awarded a doctorate in Geography from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He completed a Masters in Global Studies from the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg im Breisgau in 2007. Later he completed a Masters in Population Studies (cum laude) from the University of KwaZulu-Nata in 2012. Mr Gordon has published on the following subjects: xenophobia, international migration, social identity; intergroup relations, social capital and social cohesion as well as subjective well-being.