The new electoral power brokers: macro and micro level effects of ‘born-free’ South Africans on voter turnout

ABSTRACT

The emergence of a born-free South African generation holds significant implications for voter turnout. At the macro level, the youth bulge has changed aggregate turnout patterns, supporting Franklin’s [(2004). Voter turnout and the dynamics of electoral competition in established democracies since 1945. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press] argument that demographics shifts produce changes in aggregate political behaviour even when individuals do not change their behaviour. At the micro level, born-free South Africans exhibit attitudinal and cognitive differences from their older, partisan-led counterparts when deciding to vote, lending some support to Dalton’s [(1984). Cognitive mobilization and partisan dealignment in advanced industrial democracies. The Journal of Politics, 46(1), 264–284] cognitive mobilisation thesis.

KEYWORDS:

• Voter turnout
• born-free South Africans
• 2014 elections
• public opinion

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 is not aware of any other publication that presents South African voter turnout data disaggregated by age groups.

2 Turnout/VAP is the standard measure for voter turnout in cross-national research. See Powell (1980, p. 7); Norris (2002, p. 41); Franklin (2004, pp. 86–87).

3 The author thanks Diego Iturralde, Chief Director: Demography at Statistics South Africa for making the 2018 and 2014 VAP estimates available.

4 National Development Plan.

5 Retrospective analyses are not performed because turnout data disaggregated by age is unavailable prior to 2014 elections. To demonstrate the argument, 2014 turnout data is projected to 2019 elections.

6 1994-2014: .054; .106***; .368***; .380**; .293***.

7 http://www.elections.org.za/content/About-Us/News/IEC-and-DBE-take-electoral-democracy-into-the-classroom-2147469384/; http://www.elections.org.za/content/About-Us/News/Schools-Democracy-Week-2017/.

8 CNEP is a multi-national project, run from the Mershon Centre at The Ohio State University, in which teams of scholars study voting behavior using compatible research designs and a common core of survey questions. CNEP enables both detailed country studies built around factors that are important for those sites, and the conceptual precision and measurement parallelism applied to quite different and often complex types of political experience that supports cross-national comparison. CNEP is the oldest and the third largest cross-national survey project in the world (behind the World Values Study and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems), and is now one of the largest and most ambitious cross-national elections projects in the world. Data have already been collected from post-election surveys of democratic elections in 27 countries, including four elections in South Africa (2004, 2009, 2014 and planned for mid-2019 at time of publication). This particular article draws on a nationally representative post-election survey conducted following the 2014 elections and includes 1,300 personal interviews. Samples were drawn using multi-stage, stratified, area cluster, probability sampling. Datasets and further information can be viewed at: https://u.osu.edu/cnep/. The South African CNEP surveys are also stored at the University of Cape Town's Data First Centre.

9 ‘Young voters’ comprise those between 18 and 24 years.

10 Multinomial regression treats categorical predictors as factors. This highlights differences among groups within individual predictors. Binary logistic regression does not provide these decomposed effects.

11 The spouse/partner variable was removed from the model when testing young people to reduce multicollinearity. A frequency confirmed a small number of young people had a spouse/partner.

12 The final model originally included evaluations of political parties and leaders (including former President Jacob Zuma) but were insignificant and were omitted.