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South Africa's 1999 Elections (review of Lodge, Reynolds, Spence and Politikon special issue)

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Jeremy Seekings (2001). South Africa's 1999 Elections (review of Lodge, Reynolds, Spence and Politikon special issue). Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Book Reviews). Taylor & Francis.
Type journal article
Scope Post-1994 South African economy
Method synthesis review
Period studied 1994–1999
Regions South Africa, Western Cape, Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal
Themes politics ideology elections, transition post apartheid
Citation key seekings2001

Argument

Seekings reviews four studies of South Africa's 1999 election (Lodge, Reynolds, Spence, and a Politikon special issue). He judges the quality uneven: rich in political description but weak in explicit analysis. He argues that two questions matter: why the ANC kept its vote despite poor ratings on unemployment and crime, and why the opposition realigned (NNP collapse, DP rise). He argues the studies leave both only partly answered, that the concept of partisan identification needs to be treated as multi-dimensional (including negative identification), and that abstention and differential turnout are neglected.

Evidence and method

Review of published books and a journal issue. Draws on the studies' use of Opinion '99 polling data (IDASA/EISA/SABC/Markinor), on Mattes's 1994 findings, and on comparative literature on party identification (Rose and Mishler; Schickler and Green).

Findings

  • Seekings identifies two key questions for judging the election studies: ANC retention of support and the opposition realignment. (p. 3)

    first, how and why did the ANC retain a high level of support? And, second, how and why was there such a dramatic realignment among the opposition parties

  • Voters rated the ANC government's performance poorly on their top issues yet the ANC vote stayed stable. (p. 3)

    a large majority of voters rated as miserable the ANC government's performance on the issues that the voters themselves considered to be the most important, namely unemployment and crime

  • Partisan identification was very high in 1994 but fell to a low by late 1998, per the polls cited. (p. 4)

    partisan identification in fact declined markedly after the 1994 elections, reaching its lowest level in late 1998 - when as many as 58 percent of voters were 'independents'

  • Mattes et al. attribute ANC success to performance, campaigning and weak opposition rather than inevitability. (p. 4)

    result of [the ANC's] own solid performance in government, skilled campaigning, and a less than skilful opposition that failed to present dissatisfied voters with a credible alternative

  • The NNP collapsed in 1999 and Afrikaner nationalism disappeared as a political force, while the DP became the official opposition. (p. 4)

    which, in 1999, won just one quarter of the total number of votes it had in 1994

  • Studies fail to explain why Western Cape coloured voters stayed with the NNP while whites elsewhere defected to the DP. (p. 4)

    none of the studies provide an explanation of why so many coloured voters in the western Cape remained loyal to the NNP

  • Seekings proposes negative party identification as a missing explanatory concept. (p. 4)

    few voters had strong attachments to any party, but many voters had a deep-rooted hostility to some parties

  • Turnout fell sharply, so the biggest shift was to abstention. (p. 5)

    There were 3.5 million fewer voters in 1999 than in 1994. This means that the biggest shift in voting patterns was not from any one party to another, but from any party to abstinence.

  • The ANC's Western Cape gains came from mobilising existing supporters, not from converting other parties' voters; its urban coloured support was only about one-third. (p. 5)

    It succeeded in gaining ground not so much through converting voters who had hitherto supported other parties, but through getting its existing supporters to vote.