As South Africa approaches the 2024 general election, expectations of a shift in the political landscape are high. But does the research match the rhetoric?
A study by professors Collette Schulz-Herzenberg and Robert Britt Mattes — from Stellenbosch University and the University of Cape Town — suggests not. In delving into the psyche of the South African voter, it suggests a complex set of calculations drives decisions at the ballot box.
For a start, South African voters aren’t disengaging from politics per se; they’re simply checking out of active participation in electoral politics. They are unhappy with the ruling ANC, but the opposition options have failed to capture their imagination. The result is that the ANC continues to win the largest share of the vote — but it’s doing so from a dwindling pool of voters.
The paper “It Takes Two to Toyi-Toyi: One Party Dominance and Opposition Party Failure in South Africa’s 2019 National Election” was presented to the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) last year.
“What should happen is when people become dissatisfied with their political home, or whoever they’re voting for ... what you would expect to see in a normalised terrain is ... the voter switches. So [they] look for an alternative,” Schulz-Herzenberg tells the FM.
Instead, the authors’ analysis of the period from 2014 to 2019 showed “the ANC has continued to win vote shares from a declining electorate because voters are basically exiting the electorate rather than [doing] what we call vote switching,” she says.
It may seem an obvious conclusion, but this is the first statistical analysis to make the point.
Perhaps a more interesting question is why voters don’t switch allegiance when they’ve lost faith in their parties.
“Our argument has always been — and this is the first time we’ve really shown it with numbers and statistics — that the majority of voters in South Africa have very bleak opinions and views of opposition parties,” Schulz-Herzenberg says.
The paper shows that between 1994 and 2009 perceptions of the ANC were largely positive, with high levels of public satisfaction with the government. Thereafter, however, public evaluations of government performance declined dramatically.
So, by the 2019 poll, only 26% of study respondents believed the ANC had done a “good” or “very good” job of running the country in the five years between the 2014 and 2019 elections.
“Thus, the party was more vulnerable than ever to a capable and strategically savvy opposition,” the paper says. Only, that didn’t materialise.
There are, of course, areas in which South Africa’s opposition parties are naturally limited — the “legacy of the struggle against apartheid” for example, “means that the ANC continues to command”.
But there are areas where the opposition parties have hurt themselves. For a start, the paper says, none of South Africa’s opposition parties “provides strong evidence of a well thought-out strategy to court voters on a continuous basis by using their parliamentary platform or other events as opportunities to generate free media publicity between elections”.
Where the period between electoral campaigns gives parties the chance to communicate “coherent and credible messages”, most only launch their campaigns in the immediate lead-up to the election. At that point, however, “it is far too late to shape or reshape their public image in any significant way”.
Also, ahead of the 2019 election, instead of attempting to capture the imagination of a large number of disgruntled ANC voters, opposition parties focused their campaigns at best on a “small core of party supporters”.
Consider, for example, that the opposition was given a hand-wrapped gift by the ANC ahead of the 2019 election: former president Jacob Zuma’s resignation amid allegations of state capture, and declining voter satisfaction with the government.
It left the ANC at its “most vulnerable ... particularly to a negative campaign focused on the tangible consequences of the corruption of the Zuma years: mounting deficits, shrinking development budgets, and neglected and damaged development infrastructure, such as electricity plants, light rail services, and the national airline”, the study reads.
Instead of capitalising on the moment, the DA ran “a relatively anodyne, positive campaign focused on inclusiveness and national unity, in which the impact of corruption played a marginal role”.
Julius Malema’s EFF, too, “ignored the concerns of the majority of voters” by focusing on land redistribution and the nationalisation of key industries — “issues that few, if any, South African voters prioritised”.
The result? Only 23% of those surveyed after the 2019 election felt any opposition party could do a better job than the ANC. And only 31% believed opposition parties were more trustworthy than the ruling party.
After all that, the DA, four years on, continues to struggle with the issue of inclusivity; it has yet to break the stigma of being seen as a racially exclusive party — as has the EFF.
There’s another study — also by Schulz-Herzenberg, co-authored with California State University’s Robert Nyenhuis — on the failure of the EFF to capture the support of a potentially large populist constituency. In addition to the issue of racial exclusivity, it finds a number of other factors that leave voters lukewarm — including perceptions that it will not govern well, and that it is less credible than the DA when it comes to resolving South Africa’s deep challenges.
“Lastly, for all his stardom and media coverage, Julius Malema’s public performances have put off a considerable number of South Africans. Compared to [ANC President] Cyril Ramaphosa, three times as many citizens disliked Malema, and this number increased among those who held the strongest populist attitudes,” the paper finds.
“All in all, the party suffers from low levels of likeability of its leader and its inability to present itself as a credible alternative.”
The drop-off in voting is a concern for democracy in South Africa.
As IEC chief electoral officer Sy Mamabolo tells the FM, “democracy can only be enriched by participation”, and that means political parties should “sell themselves” to ignite the interest of the electorate.
But the electorate is checking out on other issues too. “From the research done, it appears South Africans are losing trust in state institutions. That’s a big matter for the commission as a component of the state,” he says.
“I would encourage South Africans to remember to connect with democracy,” he says, but hastens to add: “it is also not for the commission to enter the political field.”
Still, there is a sense that opposition parties are more aware of their inability thus far to capture the minds of the electorate and encourage vote switching instead of electoral exiting.
The DA’s “moonshot pact” is one such initiative.
A collaboration between opposition parties, it has come a long way since DA leader John Steenhuisen announced it earlier this year. For one, as the FM reported last month, it is no longer called the moonshot pact, after almost all opposition parties rejected the name.
Second, an independent chair has been appointed to mediate between the various parties as they look to build a pre-election coalition to take on the ANC. And, perhaps, to energise the 10-million or so voters who have checked out of the system — or the young voters who have not checked in at all.
Prof William Gumede, associate professor of the Wits School of Governance, will chair the initiative and mediate between parties. But with just six parties participating at present, the initiative is unlikely to have a huge impact on the election result.
Gumede tells the FM that part of his responsibility is to bring more parties on board in the run-up to a convention to be held later this month.
There are other initiatives too; the UDM and Freedom Front Plus, for example, have suggested that a United Democratic Front-type structure be formed to bolster political parties. A broad civic movement that is able to mobilise support for the political process, in other words.
Whether these will be enough to drive a shift in voter behaviour remains to be seen. For Schulz-Herzenberg, 2024 could just be more of the same.