By Karen E. Ferree
Post-apartheid South African elections have borne an unmistakable racial imprint: Africans vote for one set of events, whites help a special set of events, and with few exceptions, there is not any crossover balloting among teams. those vote casting developments have solidified the dominance of the ruling African nationwide Congress (ANC) over South African politics and grew to become South African elections into "racial censuses." This e-book explores the political resources of those results. It argues that even if the beginnings of those styles lie in South Africa's previous, within the results apartheid had on electorate' ideals approximately race and future and the reputations events cast in this interval, the persistence of the census displays the ruling party's skill to exploit the powers of place of work to avoid the competition from evolving clear of its apartheid-era occasion label. by way of conserving key competition events "white," the ANC has rendered them powerless, solidifying its carry on strength even with an more and more restive and upset voters.
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Extra resources for Framing the Race in South Africa: The Political Origins of Racial-Census Elections
Example text
South Africa’s opposition parties face a different but similar problem: They have political talent, but it is white. Their challenge is one of transformation, and the ANC’s monopoly hold on African politicians makes this challenging. The parties must walk a treacherous path between being too concerned about quality (and therefore changing too slowly) and being too aggressive and seeing the collapse of their human capital. The fate of the New National Party, which ironically folded into the ANC following the election in 2004, provides a telling illustration of this latter scenario.
Thus, while party labels have changed, this change has not been uniformly positive. By 2004, only about a quarter of African respondents viewed either the NP or the DP as inclusive. If changing party labels is the cornerstone to persuasion, why have the opposition parties not been more effective at it? In the game of label change, opposition parties face a natural disadvantage: They lack control over policy and patronage, and therefore they can use neither as a means of signaling their support for new constituencies.
All roads lead to Oz. Introduction 23 In sum, because of their size, South Africa’s opposition parties have struggled to obtain a sufficient supply of high-quality politicians. As such, they share commonalities with opposition parties elsewhere in the world – including places without ethnic or racial divisions. Scheiner (2006) argues that the opposition in Japan faces difficulty in attracting high-quality candidates. The Japanese central state controls fiscal resources, allowing it to punish local governments controlled by opposition parties.
