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Ethnic Voting and Political Change in South Africa*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Stanton Peele  and
Stanley J. Morse
Stanton Peele
Affiliation:
Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University
Stanley J. Morse
Affiliation:
Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo(São Paulo, Brazil)
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Abstract

Immediately prior to the 1970 parliamentary election in the Republic of South Africa, 462 white voters in Cape Town were questioned about their demographic backgrounds, voting intentions, and political attitudes. The study showed that ethnicity is the major determinant of party vote: Afrikaners vote for the National Party, the English-speaking for the United Party. SES-related factors predict party identification only insofar as they covary with ethnicity. While a liberalization of political attitudes with rising SES can be observed, this has no bearing on electoral behavior. Party vote is not related to ideological or issue orientations, but is related to the intensity of the voter's identification with his own ethnic group and with white South Africans in general. Voters tend to react positively or negatively to the NP, with the UP serving chiefly as a vehicle for protest votes against the government. The slight drop in NP support in 1970 was due to a key group of abstainers who—while basically Nat supporters—were more liberal than those who said they would vote for the NP. It is “Ambiguous Afrikaners” (those who are changing to an “English” identity), and only some of those, who are defecting completely from their traditional political allegiance. They represent the one sign of potential change in South Africa's uniquely stable political system.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 68 , Issue 4 , December 1974 , pp. 1520 - 1541
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1974

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References

1 See: Lazarsfeld, Paul F., Berelson, Bernard R., and Gaudet, Hazel, The People's Choice, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948)Google Scholar; Berelson, Bernard R., Lazarsfeld, Paul F., and McPhee, William N., Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954)Google Scholar; Campbell, Angus, Gurin, Gerald, and Miller, Warren E., The Voter Decides (Evanston, Ill.: Row, Peterson, 1954)Google Scholar; Campbell, Angus, Converse, Philip E., Miller, Warren E., and Stokes, Donald E., The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960)Google Scholar; Campbell, Angus, Converse, Philip E., Miller, Warren E., and Stokes, Donald E., Elections and the Political Order (New York: Wiley, 1966)Google Scholar.

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3 See: Campbell, Angus and Valen, Henry, “Party Identification in Norway and the United States,” in Campbell, et al. , Elections and the Political Order, pp. 245–268Google Scholar; Philip E. Converse and George Dupeux, “Politicization of the Electorate in France and the United States,” in Ibid., pp. 269–291; Butler, David and Stokes, Donald E., Political Change in Britain (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Borre, Ole and Katz, Daniel, “Party Identification and Its Motivational Base in a Multiparty System: A Study of the Danish General Election of 1971,” Scandinavian Political Studies, 8 (October, 1973), 69–111CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 For historical background, see Thompson, Leonard M., The Republic of South Africa (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966)Google Scholar; de Kiewiet, C. W., A History of South Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1962)Google Scholar; Carter, Gwendolen M., The Politics of Inequality: South Africa Since 1948 (New York: Praeger, 1958)Google Scholar; Marquard, Leo, The Peoples and Policies of South Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1962)Google Scholar.

5 As of 1968, Afrikaans-speaking people made up 58 per cent (and Jews 4 per cent) of the 3,639,000 whites in South Africa—this against 1,912,000 Coloureds (racially mixed), 574,000 Asians (mostly Indians), and 13,042,000 black Africans of “Bantu” extraction. See Horrell, Muriel, A Survey of Race Relations in South Africa: 1968 (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1969)Google Scholar.

6 Lever, Henry, The South African Voter (Cape Town: Juta, 1972)Google Scholar.

7 Lazarsfeld, et al. , The People's Choice, pp. 25–27Google Scholar.

8 Borre and Katz, “Party Identification and Its Motivational Base in a Multiparty System.”

9 Lazarsfeld, et al. , The People's Choice, p. 62Google Scholar; Berelson, et al. , Voting, pp. 283–284Google Scholar.

10 Barber, James Alden Jr.,, Social Mobility and Voting Behavior (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1970), pp. 165–168Google Scholar.

11 Because of the country's racially based class system, South African whites have one of the highest per capita rates of university attendance in the world. As reported in Horrell, A Survey of Race Relations, there are 68,549 university students out of a white population of 3,639,000.

12 See Campbell et al., The American Voter, and Butler and Stokes, Political Change in Britain.

13 Only the white electorate participates in national parliamentary elections. Coloured (see Note 5) voters elect a majority of members of the essentially powerless Coloured Representative Council, as do Africans in the case of the equally ineffectual Bantu urban councils. As yet, those few “Bantustan” (African homelands) legislative assemblies which exist are made up of a majority of appointees. For a study of the Coloured election held in 1970, see Morse, Stanley J. and Peele, Stanton, “‘Coloured Power’ or ‘Coloured Bourgeoisie’? A Survey of Political Attitudes Among Coloureds in South Africa,” Public Opinion Quarterly (Fall, 1974)Google Scholar.

14 Kish, Leslie, “A Procedure for Objective Respondent Selection Within the Household,” Journal of the American Statistical Association, 44 (September, 1949), 380–387CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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16 This score consists of the number of incorrect responses to items which asked (1) the name of the respondent's current M.P., (2) the current M.P.'s party, (3) the name of the Nat candidate in respondent's constituency, (4) the total number of seats in Parliament (scored as correct if in the 150–180 range, the actual figure being 166), and (5) the total population of South Africa (scored as correct if in the 15,000,000–25,000,000 range, the actual figure being approximately 20,000,000). A score of 0 indicates all correct answers, a score of 5 all incorrect answers.

17 The small number of Prog (and HNP) voters makes their impact on the overall statistics negligible, and the statistics regarding these parties should be regarded merely as providing a descriptive profile of their supporters.

18 Thompson, , The Republic of South Africa, p. 103Google Scholar.

19 A statistical caveat: The very effectiveness of ethnicity as a predictor makes for small N's in some cells of the controlled data. Only 33 of the 149 English respondents who answered the voting question said they would go Nat. And only 28 of the 117 Afrikaans Rs who gave their intended vote reported that it would be for the UP. In the tables presented in this section, actual N's will accompany percentages so that no mistakes about the extent and significance of a trend can occur. (For further comments, see also the Methodological Appendix.)

20 Many writers have attributed great psychological and political significance to a shift in home language for the Afrikaner. Cf. Munger, Edwin S., Afrikaner and African Nationalism (London: Oxford University Press, 1967)Google Scholar.

21 Katz, Daniel, “Social Psychology and Group Process,” in Annual Review of Psychology, ed. Stone, C. P. (Stanford, Calif.: Annual Reviews, Inc., 1951)Google Scholar.

22 Lazarsfeld et al., The People's Choice.

23 Afrikaans sociology characterizes such individuals as having the same self-hate that some blacks in the United States and Jews in Europe are said to exhibit. Pauw, S., in Die Beroepsarbeid van die Afrikaner in die Stad (Stellenbosch: Pro Ecclesia, 1946)Google Scholar, speaks of the “spiritual slavery” which Anglicization meant for Afrikaners who sought admission to the English economic, cultural, and educational elites.

24 Lever, The South African Voter.

25 Ibid.

26 At first sight, this finding would seem to contradict recent characterizations of the “floating voter” as less informed and involved than the stable voter, and even to reaffirm traditional notions of vote changers as rational and discriminating. But as Converse points out, the “floating voter” hypothesis comes from the American presidential elections, during which all but a handful of isolated (and hence politically stable) individuals are blanketed with political news. In off-year congressional elections, which do not receive much coverage from the media, we can observe “the least involved being more likely to follow normal behavior patterns than the more involved who do manage to pick up some new information from the weaker flow” (Converse, Philip E., “Information Flow and the Stability of Partisan Attitudes,” in Campbell, et al. , Elections and the Political Order, pp. 136–157)Google Scholar. South Africa, with no television and a poorly informed electorate, and with its mass of stable voters choosing on the basis of tradition and religious instruction, would seem to fit the American congressional model.

27 Responses to these questions for the overall sample show a clearcut pattern. Indians are the least liked racial group, followed by Africans and the relatively benign-seeming Coloureds. (Means are 2.7, 3.2, and 4.4 respectively, with a higher score indicating greater closeness.) A probable explanation for the more intense dislike of Indians than blacks is that Indians are economically and socially more challenging to the white population.

28 Pettigrew, Thomas F., “Personality and Sociocultural Factors in Intergroup Attitudes: A Cross-National Comparison,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2 (March, 1957), 29–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Orpen, Christopher, “Authoritarianism Within an ‘Authoritarian’ Culture” (doctoral dissertation, University of Cape Town, 1970)Google Scholar, and Orpen, Christopher, “The Effect of Cultural Factors on the Relationship Between Prejudice and Personality,” Journal of Psychology, 78 (May, 1971), 73–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 van der Merwe, Hendrik W. and Buitendag, J. J., “Political, Ethnic and Structural Differences Among White South Africans,” in ASSA, Sociology Southern Africa 1973 (Durban: University of Natal), pp. 106–121Google Scholar, have observed a unifying trend within the white South African elite over the past decade, with the government de-emphasizing traditional English-Afrikaans differences in the interest of broadening the Afrikaner ethos into a South African national ethos.

31 The major limitation of Lever's The South African Voter is his failure to apply statistical controls for ethnicity, and other factors. See the review of Lever's book by Morse, Stanley J. in the Journal of Modern African Studies, 12 (1974), 141–143CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 For the Norwegian case, see Campbell and Valen, “Party Identification in Norway and the United States.”

33 Borre and Katz, “Party Identification and Its Motivational Base in a Multiparty System.”

34 Barber, Social Mobility and Voting Behavior.

35 Lever, The South African Voter.

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