This is election week in South Africa. Although many people see elections as a waste of time and part of political rhetoric, it forms the basis and lies at the heart of democracy. It is symbolic of the whole democratic process and many people lost their lives in South Africa and world-wide for the right to cast a vote.
The lack of universal suffrage was at the heart of the long struggle against the apartheid system. Elections make a fundamental contribution to democratic governance. Because direct democracy – a form of government in which political decisions are made directly by the entire body of qualified citizens – is impractical in most modern societies, democratic government is conducted through representatives.
Elections enable voters to select leaders and hold them accountable for their performance in office. Accountability can be undermined when elected leaders do not care whether they are re-elected or when, for historical or other reasons, one party or coalition is so dominant that there is effectively no choice for voters among alternative candidates, parties, or policies.
Nevertheless, the possibility of controlling leaders by requiring them to submit to regular and periodic elections helps to solve the problem of succession in leadership and thus contributes to the continuation of democracy.
Moreover, where the electoral process is competitive and forces candidates or parties to expose their records and future intentions to popular scrutiny, elections serve as forums for the discussion of public issues and facilitate the expression of public opinion. Elections thus provide political education for citizens and ensure the responsiveness of democratic governments to the will of the people.
They also serve to legitimise the acts of those who wield power. The Republic of South Africa is a parliamentary representative democratic republic. The president of South Africa serves both as head of state and head of government – in the same manner as prime ministers of other nations. The president is elected by the National Assembly (the lower house of the South African Parliament) and must enjoy the confidence of the Assembly in order to remain in office. South Africans also elect provincial legislatures, which govern each of the country’s nine provinces.
Since the end of apartheid in the 1990s, the African National Congress (ANC) has dominated South Africa’s politics. The ANC is the ruling party in the national legislature, as well as in eight of the nine provinces, having received 65.9% of the vote in the 2009 general elections and 62.9% of the popular vote in the 2011 municipal elections. The main challenger to the ANC’s rule is the Democratic Alliance, led by Helen Zille, which received 16.66% of the vote in the 2009 election and 24.1% of the popular vote in the 2011 election.
As of 2009, Jacob Zuma has served as the South African president. On 27 April, 1994, South Africa held its first ever free and democratic elections. Millions of black South Africans waited patiently in line to cast their votes for the first time. The road to the elections was not easy, particularly because of right-wing extremists and Inkatha’s agreement to participate only at the last minute.
The ANC won a resounding victory, carrying all provinces except the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, but it did not gain the two-thirds majority required to be able to change the constitution unilaterally. According to a recent South African Social Attitudes Survey undertaken by the Human Sciences Research Council, more than half the population of South Africa – 51% – is dissatisfied with the state of democracy.
The survey found that before the 2004 national and provincial elections, 48% of the adult population were satisfied with democracy, while 38% were dissatisfied. Between 2003 and 2008 a slight reversal in trends was apparent, with the 2008 results showing that, for the first time, a greater proportion of people were dissatisfied than satisfied: 45% compared with 37%.
In the case of those supporting the ruling party, satisfaction levels fell 15 percentage points over the decade, from 54% to 39%, while satisfaction declined by 12 percentage points for those supporting opposition parties.
Almost four fifths of the adult public (79%) agreed that ‘it is the duty of all citizens to vote’ while 46% did not believe their vote would make any difference to electoral outcomes. Forty-five percent were positive about the power of their vote.
