![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
Democracy scores for South Africa are now quite high. How is this to be explained? Testing social, economic, cultural and institutional models of democracy, we suggest that South Africa's current democratic stability is best explained by a combination of institutional and political culture factors. The ANC in South Africa is found to be an interesting example of a dominant party. In contrast to superficially similar cases in Mexico and Taiwan, the position of the ANC is based upon electoral mobilisation not state monopolisation. However, in the long run any dominant party poses a risk for democracy, especially if contextual conditions do not fully support democratic stability. Civil society is identified as an important factor that is conducive to democratic vitality in South Africa.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for CCP and the editor for their helpful comments and suggestions; the usual caveat applies!
Notes
1. It is well known that the scores on civil liberties and political rights go together and therefore well could form the basis of a one-dimensional democracy index; see Banks (Citation1989: 675). For any given year the democracy score is arrived at through the following computation: democracy score = ((14 – (political rights score + civil liberties score)/12 ) * 9)+1.
2. This index measures the level of political and civil freedoms in South Africa from 1934 to 1997 and varies between 0 (no freedom) and 200 (freedom). The construction and interpretation of the index is detailed by Fedderke et al. (Citation2001: 108–113).
3. According to the Economist index of democracy for 2006, South Africa comes very close to the countries classified as ‘full democracies’, scoring 7.91 to compare with Mauritius scoring 8.04 (see Kekic, Citation2006: 3). Another attempt to measure the level of democracy in South Africa in 2004 arrives at a score of 63 of a potential 100 (see Graham & Calland, Citation2005: 37).
4. For a study employing a similar design, see Vanhanen Citation(2004).