”South Africans choose to vote for political parties for many reasons — sometimes obvious, and sometimes subtle — but they are not simply trapped into casting their ballots along racial and ethnic lines.
”Casting a ballot is primarily not an instrumental calculation but an expression of who a citizen is. And people will go to great lengths to express who they are,” said Steven Friedman, senior researcher at the Centre for Policy Studies.
He points out that most South African parties are defined by — and draw their support from — those groups that can best identify with them, be it for reasons of race, language or class.
But Dr Thabisi Hoeane, politics lecturer at Rhodes University, says that while he agrees that identity politics is a proven theory, it is too simplistic to pin voting behaviour on this. The reality, he says, is more complex than ”South Africans being trapped in racial and ethnic politics”.
For example, ”the reason why the majority of black people are not voting for the Democratic Alliance is not because it is a white party but simply because it does not represent them and their material interests. In addition to this, the DA is hostile towards a significant and influential portion of South Africa’s voters — organised workers through trade unions, especially the Congress of South African Trade Unions.”
South Africa is a young democracy and the African National Congress ”still has very powerful meaning for the majority in this country”, says Hoeane. Despite the common accusation that the ANC has abandoned its vision of an egalitarian society in favour of ”neo-liberalism”, it is still believed to espouse the interests of the great majority.
Hoeane believes that economic and class considerations are better explanations for voting behaviour. ”Voters who are unsatisfied with the ANC’s performance tend to stay away from the polls because they feel there is no alternative,” he says. ”Compared to the ANC the opposition doesn’t represent the politics of the majority of the country.”
Other analysts have also pointed out that the majority of South Africans cast their ballots for who they want to lead the country, and not to create a strong opposition to the government.
”To a large degree South Africans are voting with their hearts and not with their minds, they are voting with their guts,” says Mari Harris, a director of market research company Markinor. ”People complain about the four big issues — unemployment, poverty, crime and HIV/Aids — but these issues will not change their voting behaviour because we simply do not have an issue-driven electorate.”
Bob Mattes, director of the Democracy in Africa Research Unit, has some reservations about the importance of party policies in convincing voters about where to cast their ballots. ”Policies tend to come into play when people are so dissatisfied that they begin to look around for another party. Then they may start looking at policies to see who best represents their interests or who they best identify with.” However, he also points out that people rarely study policies in detail, they just want to know that their party has a plan.
But, while the ANC’s election campaign emphasises an inclusive commitment to addressing people’s day-to-day material concerns, poor people may stay away from the polls because their expectations of democracy have not been met, says Roger Southall, executive director of democracy and governance at the Human Sciences Research Council. ”If you’ve got a close linkage between development and delivery and delivery is lacking, especially in many rural areas, you might well find a fall-off in voter participation, and I think that it is going to be the have-nots who are less likely to vote then the haves.
”In the United States we know perfectly well that the guys who get into power represent a very small segment of American society, and there is a real prospect of that happening here — except that it won’t alternate between parties for the foreseeable future.”
Only 50% of the registered American electorate vote and this ”reflects the preferences of those well-off”, he says.
In any event, the conventional wisdom that the apparent failure of the government to deliver improved essential services to communities may count against the ANC in the election, may well be wrong. Some analysts point out that the government does not need to improve access to services to every home. Rather, people simply need to see that the government is rolling out development initiatives around them to believe that if they stick with the governing party these improvements will eventually reach their community.
President Thabo Mbeki alluded to this in an interview with the SABC after his State of the Nation address earlier this month. He said: ”People are given hope because they see that development is coming when they look at what is happening in the village next door to theirs.”
Mattes also points out that people will often not necessarily blame the government for their personal living condition. ”An individual may understand the reasons why he does not have money in his pocket or is with- out a job. ‘My boss didn’t like me or I wasn’t very good at my job,’” Mattes explains. However, he points out that if the entire community is unemployed people will blame the government simply because they can see the problem is endemic and they would expect the state to do something about it.