The Electoral System

The Past

The history of electoral systems in South Africa and of the concomitant political debate that it invoked can be divided into a number of distinct phases. The following offers a few highlights in this regard.

During the 19th century elementary electoral systems developed in the Cape Colony, the colony of Natal, the constitutional arrangements of the Voortrekkers and later in the Boer Republics of the Orange Free State and Transvaal. These systems became more sophisticated as colonies became more autonomous, and as a matter of fact toward the end of the 19th century Lord Bryce described the Orange Free State as a model republic of 19th-century democracy. Except for the Cape Colony, organized political parties had little influence on the functioning of these electoral systems (du Plessis, 1979: 49–80; Nieuwoudt, 1966: 71–80 and 1979: 23–48).

With the unification of South Africa in 1910 the electoral systems of the pre-existing British colonies were supplanted by a single-member geographical constituency system that functioned on the basis of relative majorities. The principles of this system, which was used for the election of members of Parliament and the various Provincial Councils, remained essentially unaltered for more than 80 years. The system was retained when the country became a republic in 1961 (Pienaar, 1979: 81–102) and in 1983 when South Africa's bicameral Parliament made way for the so-called three-chamber Parliament. With minor adaptations the same system was also used in the so-called self-governing territories and the ‘independent’ homelands created by the policies of the National Party government.

In a political sense, the main features of this system were that it denied on racial grounds the franchise to the largest portion of the population, and that it severely distorted the relative strength of political parties in Parliament. While blacks and Coloureds initially retained the franchise which they had in the former colonies of Natal and the Cape, it was effectively removed in 1936 and 1955 respectively. The franchise extended to Coloureds and Indians in the three-chamber Parliament of 1983 was nothing more than tokenism since it still precluded these population groups from electing representatives to that parliamentary chamber which had sovereign legislative authority in the land. The classic illustration of disproportionality in South African electoral history is the 1948 election where the National Party/Afrikaner Verbond drew 42 percent of the vote and won 79 seats, as against the United/Labour Parties which drew 52 percent of the vote, but which won only 71 seats. Scholars have shown that for the period 1961–81 the National Party (NP), on average, drew more than 50 percent of the vote, but held approximately 75 percent of the seats in Parliament. The disproportional ratio is quite dramatic (Butler, 1983: 53; Mackie and Rose, 1974).

During the period 1983–90 the three-chamber Parliament as a distorted application of, among others, Lijphart's ideas on consociational democracy (proportionality, elite cooperation, mutual veto, etc.) did not live up to expectations and increasingly lost legitimacy among its own supporters. Against the background of escalating instability in the country, the National Party government conceded that the Westminster electoral system (winner-takes-all or first-past-the-post system) was not the most appropriate electoral system for a deeply divided plural society like South Africa. The appeal of (especially Lijphart's) consociational ideas persisted and was hotly debated in government and academic circles as a possible way of salvaging the deepening political crisis in the country. This debate ranged from an emphasis on the definition of groups vis-a-vis other groups (horizontal representation) to the way in which groups themselves should be represented from within (vertical representation) to the desirability of consociationalism per se (Basson, 1984; Faure, 1987: 3–23 and 1988: 143–69; Lijphart, 1985; Thompson, 1986: 12).

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