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ABSTRACT
Why do dominant parties continue to win elections despite significant governance failures? Scholars of one party democracies tend to locate explanations at the macro-level: manipulation of rules, control over state media, or selective distribution of benefits to supporters. Other scholars emphasize ethnic or religious identities which trump consideration of policy and performance. We employ a multinomial regression model of voter decisions in South Africa’s 2019 general election to explore how the ruling African National Congress managed to secure 58% of the vote amidst a massive corruption scandal and waning public services. We find that dissatisfied government supporters do not ignore poor performance, but must perceive a legitimate alternative amongst the opposition before they switch their vote. Otherwise, they exit the electorate. This allows the governing party to win significant proportions of a diminishing electorate. Thus, decisions about whether to vote are not just a result of resources, mobilization or efficacy, but are also rooted in perceptions of governing and opposition parties. Voter turnout and vote choice are intimately linked, rather than separate causal processes. Moreover, continued one-party dominance may be as much a function of opposition party failure as it is of government control over rules, rents or resources.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Paul Beck, Russell Dalton, Narisong Huhe, Nicholas Kerr, Jaime Bleck, Robert Nyenhuis, Matthias Kroenke, Thomas Schober, and Thomas Isbell and the panel audiences at the 2022 Annual Conference of the American Political Science Association, the 2022 Annual Conference of the Election, Public Opinion and Parties Specialist Group of the British Political Studies Association, and the 2020 Annual Conference of the World Association of Public Opinion Research, for insightful comments and suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 The toyi-toyi is a rhythmic, high-kneed, foot-stomping southern African dance, punctuated by chanting and is a powerful statement of both protest and celebration. It is associated in South Africa with marches and rallies held by the African National Congress or allied organizations.
2 Pempel, “Conclusion”; Giliomee and Simkins, The Awkward Embrace; Greene, “Dominant Party Strategy”; De Jager and Du Toit, Friend or Foe; Southall, Liberation Movements.
3 While some scholars explore how the failings of African opposition parties might sustain one-party dominance, opposition weakness is attributed to institutional and structural factors (see Lindberg, “Opposition parties”; Rakner and van der Walle, “Democratization by elections?”). Few studies explore vote switching in African elections (Lindberg and Morrison, “Exploring voter alignments”) and fewer address how voter perceptions of opposition parties affect party dominance (see Hanson, Post-Imperial Democracies; Platas and Raffler, “Closing the Gap”).
4 Pauw, The President’s Keepers; Haffajee and Chipkin, Days of Zondo; Chipkin and Swilling, Shadow State; Judicial Commission of Inquiry into State Capture Report: part 1 https://www.gov.za/sites/default/files/gcis_document/202201/judicial-commission-inquiry-state-capture-reportpart-1.pdf
5 Ramaphosa’s “new dawn” agenda of renewal and anti-corruption was an electoral asset for the ANC without whom the party’s result may have been worse. Also see Schulz-Herzenberg, “The 2019 National Election”.
6 Horowitz, Ethnic Groups; Horowitz, A Democratic South Africa?; Johnson and Schlemmer, Launching Democracy; Giliomee, “South Africa's emerging”; Giliomee et al., “Dominant Party Rule”; Harris, Everyday Identity.
7 Schulz-Herzenberg, “Trends in Voter Participation,” 53.
8 Ibid., 56.
9 Bekker et al. “Beyond the Binary: Examining Dynamic Youth Voter Behaviour in South Africa,” 297–317. found evidence of limited vote switching among young voters. However, the majority of young voters abstain.
10 See endnote 4.
11 Lieberman and Lekalake, “South Africa's Resilient Democracy”.
12 In his 2021 Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement the country’s finance minister Enoch Godongwana warned that rampant corruption was draining public finances: https://theconversation.com/south-africas-corruption-busters-short-changed-on-funding-and-political-commitment-173072. In September 2017, former Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan estimated the cost of state capture at 250 billion rand (https://www.citizen.co.za/news/south-africa/1651069/r250bn-lost-to-state-capture-in-the-last-three-years-says-gordhan/); The Daily Maverick estimated that state capture cost roughly R1.5 trillion (https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2019-03-01-state-capture-wipes-out-third-of-sas-r4-9-trillion-gdp-never-mind-lost-trust-confidence-opportunity/). The South African Reserve Bank found state capture reduced GDP growth by 4% a year (https://www.news24.com/fin24/Economy/damage-from-state-capture-worse-than-suspected-sarb-20190606).
13 Mattes et al., “South African Parties”.
14 Mattes, “The 2014 Election”; Africa, “Do Election Campaigns Matter”; Southall, “Opposition in South Africa”; Maloka, “‘White’ Political Parties.”
15 Africa, “Do Election Campaigns Matter.”
17 https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/eff-2019-election-manifesto. According to Afrobarometer, land redistribution was seen as a key issue by 7% of South Africans in 2018. See Nkomo, “Land Redistribution”.
18 Schulz-Herzenberg, “The 2019 National Election,” 185.
19 Large proportions of the electorate either see opposition parties as exclusive but similar proportions say they simply do not know enough about opposition parties to conclude one way or the other (29 percent for the DA, 35 percent for the EFF and 56 percent for the IFP). For parties that have been in existence for a long time (the EFF was six years old, while the DA, IFP and FF+ were all at least 25 years old), these are damning indictments of their strategies.
20 A handful of scholars stress the importance of using single unified voter decision models that simultaneously account for choice and participation and argue that the literature has largely neglected this relationship. See Weschle, “Two Types”; Söderlund, “Retrospective Voting”; Tillman, “Economic Judgments”; Pierce, “Modelling Electoral”; Thurner and Eymann, “Policy-specific Alienation”; Lacy and Burden, “The Vote-stealing”. Fewer still argue that within this unified model the turnout decision may be dependent on voter evaluations of the parties that stand for election (exceptions include Weschle, “Two types,” 52).
21 Campbell et al., The American Voter; Fiorina, Retrospective Voting; Dalton, Citizen Politics. Scholars also identify a set of more distal factors such as parental and peer socialization, and group membership, and political values.
22 Blais, “Turnout in Elections”; Feddersen, “Rational Choice Theory”; Norris, Democratic Deficit; Rolfe, Voter Turnout.
23 Downs, An Economic Theory.
24 Riker and Ordeshook, “A Theory”.
25 Downs, An Economic Theory, 39
26 Ibid., 260.
27 Lipset and Rokkan, Party Systems.
28 In South Africa, for instance, an average of 32 percent over successive post-election surveys have told SANES interviewers that they do not use, or do not understand these terms. In the 1994 South African National Election Study post-election survey, 40 percent of respondents say they did not use or understand these terms; in 2004, 31 percent gave the same answer, declining to 25 by the 2014 survey.
29 For evidence of how voter cleavages vary, even within industrialized states, depending on those societies’ social revolutions, see Rose and Urwin, “Social cohesion”.
30 Trilling, Party Image.
31 Rose and McAllister, The Loyalties of Voters, 132.
32 Richardson, “European Party Loyalties,” 23.
33 Butler and Stokes, Political Change; Popkin, The Reasoning Voter; Rose and McAllister, The Loyalties of Voters; Dalton, Citizen Politics.
34 Popkin, The Reasoning Voter; Chandra, Why Ethnic Parties; Green et al., Partisan Hearts; Dalton, Citizen Politics.
35 Popkin, The Reasoning Voter.
36 Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict.
37 Ferree, Framing the Race.
38 Mattes, The Election Book; Mattes et al., “Judgment and Choice”; Mattes and Piombo, “Opposition Parties”; Ferree “Explaining South Africa’s”; Ferree, Framing the Race; Schulz-Herzenberg, “Trends”; Habib and Schulz-Herzenberg, “Democratization”; Gordon, “Racial Animosity”.
39 Mattes, The Election Book; Schulz-Herzenberg, “Trends in Party Support”.
40 For evidence of competence evaluations see Mattes et al., “Judgment and Choice”; Mattes and Piombo, “Opposition Parties”; Southall, “Opposition in South Africa”; Maloka, “’White’ Political Parties”.
41 The picture of the presidential candidate also appears next to the party symbol on election ballots. For evidence of leadership evaluations see Mattes et al., “Judgment and Choice”; Mattes and Piombo, “Opposition Parties.”
42 CNEP is a cross-national project based at the Mershon Centre, Ohio State University which conducts post-election surveys of democratic elections in 27 countries, including four elections in South Africa (2004, 2009, 2014 and 2019). For datasets and reports see: https://u.osu.edu/cnep/ and https://www.datafirst.uct.ac.za/.
43 Niemi and Weisberg, Classics in Voting; Teixeira, “Turnout in the 1992”; Blais, “Turnout in Elections”.
44 Blais, “Turnout in Elections;” Norris, Democratic Phoenix.
45 Huckfeldt and Sprague, “Networks in Context”; Beck et al., “The Social Calculus”; Franklin, Voter Turnout; Richardson and Beck, “The Flow of Political”; Magalhães et al., “Mobilisation”.
46 Farrell et al., “The Changing British Voter”; Blais et al., “Measuring Party Identification”; Dalton and Wattenberg, Parties Without Partisans; Lachat, “Explaining Electoral Volatility”; Rattinger & Wiegand, “Volatility on the Rise?”.
47 Campbell et al., The American Voter; Key, The Responsible Electorate; Fiorina, Retrospective Voting; Popkin, The Reasoning Voter; Norris, Critical Citizens; Torcal and Montero Political Disaffection; Berelson et al., Voting; Zelle, “Social Dealignment”; Dalton and Weldon, “Public Images”; Dassonneville, Electoral Volatility; Söderlund, “Retrospective Voting”; Dassonneville et al., “Staying With the Party”.
48 Campbell et al., The American Voter; Key, The Responsible Electorate; Fiorina, Retrospective Voting; Popkin, The Reasoning Voter.
49 In other models, we included a rating of trustworthiness of opposition parties relative to government. This measure was highly statistically significant and overpowered the impact of other opposition party ratings suggesting that trust in a party is itself an outcome of inclusiveness, competence, and an attractive leader. We include these variables instead because they offer more granular views of opposition party attributes.
50 The Odds Ratio provides the probability of exiting for each unit change in a respondent’s approval of government performance, which has four ascending categories.
51 Giliomee et al., “Dominant Party Rule”; De Kadt and Lieberman, “Nuanced Accountability”.
52 The estimates in Step 3B Column 7 are the inverse of Step 3A Column 5 because the comparison groups are the same with the categories reversed.
53 Due to an empty cell, there are issues with the calculation of some statistical results for this independent variable (see in the supplemental material). Amongst dissatisfied 2014 ANC voters who did not see any opposition party as competent to govern, absolutely no respondents switched their vote. Thus, while the model generates logistic regression coefficients, it does not calculate a standard error or p-value in , columns 1 and 4, and generates uninterpretable odds ratios in columns 1, 3 and 4.
54 Johnson and Schlemmer, Launching Democracy; Giliomee et al., “Dominant Party Rule”.
55 Voter behaviour may not necessarily follow the same trends at the local level. Mirroring national trends, the 2021 municipal elections also witnessed a sharp decline in overall voter turnout. But there was also some evidence of volatility in aggregate vote shares, and possible vote switching in a limited number of metros such as the cities of Johannesburg and Tshwane. We attribute this to the effect of the mixed electoral system in municipal elections where voters are able to choose amongst individual candidates for a councillor in single member wards, as well as choose amongst parties in a proportional representation ballot. In Johannesburg, for example, most small parties won greater numbers of votes for their ward candidates than for the party, suggesting that local candidates were able to use direct connection to voters to draw support away from the larger parties. However, this dynamic was evident in only a few large urban councils.
56 Mashele and Qobo, The Fall of the ANC; Joubert, Who Will Rule; Haffajee “ANC’s Collapse”; Mattisonn, “Who Will Eat”.
57 Mattes and Piombo, “Opposition Parties,” 125.
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Notes on contributors
Collette Schulz-Herzenberg
Collette Schulz-Herzenberg is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Stellenbosch University, South Africa.
Robert Britt Mattes
Robert Mattes is Professor of Government and Public Policy at the University of Strathclyde, and Adjunct Professor in the Nelson Mandela School for Public Governance at the University of Cape Town.