The
National Assembly parliamentary and provincial elections held in South Africa in 1994 marked the high
point of a period of tumultuous change from authoritarian rule to
multiparty democracy in Southern Africa as a
whole. At midnight on 27 April 1994 perhaps the most despised flag in Africa was lowered, heralding the end of 300 years of
colonialism and four decades of apartheid. Those first multiparty democratic
elections opened the stage to political movements which had been driven
underground by the Pretoria
regime’s policy of racial divide and rule. Nelson Mandela’s African National
Congress (ANC) was poised on the threshold of power; the Pan-Africanist
Congress of Azania (PAC) was challenging it within the same community, while
Mangosotho Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) hoped to build on its
hegemony in the north of the province
of KwaZulu-Natal. These
new parties joined F. W. De Klerk’s National Party (NP), the liberal Democratic
Party (DP) and the new Freedom Front (FF)—a descendant of the ‘white right’
parties of the old constitutional dispensation—in battling for the votes of
millions of newly-enfranchised people.
Elections
were conducted under List PR with half the National Assembly (200 members)
being chosen from nine provincial lists and the other half being elected from a
single national list. In effect, the country used one nationwide constituency
(with 400 members) for the conversion of votes into seats, and no formal threshold
for representation was imposed.
The Droop
Quota was used to allocate seats, and surplus seats were awarded by an
adaptation of the Largest Remainder Method. Early drafts of the electoral law
put the threshold for parliamentary representation at 5 per cent of the
national vote but, in a concession to the smaller parties, the ANC and the NP
agreed in early 1994 to drop any ‘mandatory’ threshold. However, only those
parties with 20 or more MPs, 5 per cent of the Assembly, were guaranteed
portfolios in the first government’s cabinet of national unity.
The fact
that the ‘Mandela liberation-movement juggernaut’ would have won the National
Assembly elections under almost any electoral system cannot diminish the
importance of South Africa’s
choice of a List PR system for these first elections. The PR system, as an
integral part of other power-sharing mechanisms in the new constitution, was
crucial to creating the atmosphere of inclusiveness and reconciliation which
precipitated the decline of the worst political violence and has made
post-apartheid South Africa
something of a beacon of hope and stability to the rest of troubled Africa.
Nevertheless,
in 1990, upon Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, there was no particular
reason to believe that South
Africa would adopt PR. The ‘whites-only’
Parliament had always been elected by an FPTP system, while the ANC, now in a
powerful bargaining position, expected to be clearly advantaged if FPTP were
maintained. As only five electoral districts, out of over 700, had white
majorities, the ANC, with 50–60 per cent of the popular vote, expected to win
70 per cent or 80 per cent of the parliamentary seats easily due to the
vagaries of FPTP voting. But the ANC did not opt for this course because it
realized that the disparities of a ‘winner-takes-all’ electoral system would be
fundamentally destabilizing in the long run for minority and majority
interests. List PR also avoided the politically charged and controversial
question of having to draw constituency boundaries and, furthermore, it fitted
in with the executive power-sharing ethos which both the ANC and the
Nationalists saw as a key tenet of the interim constitution.
It is
probable that, even with their geographical pockets of electoral support, the
Freedom Front (which won nine seats in the new National Assembly), the
Democratic Party (seven seats), the Pan-Africanist Congress (five seats), and
the African Christian Democratic Party (two seats) would have failed to win a
single parliamentary seat if the elections had been held under a single-member
district FPTP electoral system. While these parties together only had 6 per
cent of the members of the new Assembly, their importance inside the structures
of government far outweighs their numerical strength.
A reading
of the detailed results reveals, somewhat surprisingly, that in 1994 List PR
may not have particularly advantaged the medium-sized NP and the IFP over and
above the number of seats they would have expected to win under an FPTP system.
This was primarily due to the ‘national referendum’ nature of the campaign,
which led to a two-party battle between the old and the new—the ANC versus the
IFP in KwaZulu-Natal
province, and the ANC versus the NP in the rest of the country. Furthermore,
the ethnically homogeneous nature of constituencies and the strong geographical
concentrations of support in South
Africa meant that the NP and the IFP would
have won only slightly fewer seats under a constituency system. However, FPTP
would in all likelihood have given the ANC a small ‘seat bonus’, increasing its
share of the seats in the National Assembly beyond its share of the popular
vote (which was 62 per cent) and beyond the two-thirds majority needed to draft
the new constitution without reference to other parties.
The practice
of having one ballot for the National Assembly and one for the provincial
parliament also proved to be an important innovation in the electoral system
design. Until a few months before the election, the ANC was still insisting on
a single ballot which would be counted for both the national and provincial
elections. This was quite clearly a manoeuvre to advantage the larger,
nationally-based parties and was only changed through the pressure of an
alliance of business leaders, the Democratic Party, and international advisers.
The eventual results did show that large numbers of voters had split their
national and provincial ballots between two parties, and it appears as though
the major beneficiaries of separating the ballots were the small Democratic Party
and the Freedom Front. Both polled more than 200,000 votes in the provincial
elections over and above their national result, which went a long way to
explain the 490,000 drop between the NP’s national and provincial totals.
The choice
of electoral system has also had an impact upon the composition of the
Parliament along the lines of ethnicity and gender. The South African National
Assembly sworn into office in May 1994 contained over 80 former members of the
whites-only parliament, but that was where the similarities between the old and
the new ended. In direct contrast to South Africa’s troubled history,
black sat with white, communist with conservative, Zulu with Xhosa, and Muslim
with Christian. To a significant extent the diversity of the new National
Assembly was a product of the use of List PR. The national, and unalterable,
candidate lists allowed parties to present ethnically heterogeneous groups of
candidates which, it was hoped, would have cross-cutting appeal. The resulting
National Assembly was 52 per cent black (including Xhosa-, Zulu-, Sotho-,
Venda-, Tswana-, Pedi-, Swazi-, Shangaan- and Ndebele-speaking), 32 per cent
white (English- and Afrikaans-speaking), 8 per cent Indian, and 7 per cent
Coloured—this compared to an electorate which was estimated to be 73 per cent
black, 15 per cent white, 9 per cent Coloured, and 3 per cent Indian. Women
made up 27 per cent of MPs.
In 1999 the
proportion of black MPs rose to 58 per cent and that of Coloured MPs rose to 10
per cent, while whites made up 26 per cent and Indians 5 per cent. In 2004 the
black proportion (65 per cent) came closer to their population share, while
whites made up 22 per cent. Numbers of Coloured and Indian MPs held roughly
steady. The proportion of women MPs rose to 30 per cent in 1999 and to 33 per
cent in 2004. There is a widespread belief in South Africa that if FPTP had been
introduced there would have been far fewer women, Indians and whites, with more
black and male MPs.
Finally,
more polarized forms of representation would be expected under FPTP, with
whites (of different parties) representing majority white constituencies,
Xhosas representing Xhosas, Zulus representing Zulus, and so on. While problems
with lack of district accountability and of remoteness are perceived effects of
the present South African List PR system, it has meant that citizens have a
variety of MPs to approach when the need arises. Nevertheless, there is a
continuing debate in South
Africa about how to increase democratic
accountability and the representativeness of the MPs. It was widely accepted
that the first non-racial election was more of a referendum about which parties
should draw up the new constitution. But subsequent elections have been about
constituting a representative Parliament, and many political actors and voters
argue that the electoral system needs to be altered to take this into account.
Today, all
the major political parties still support the principle of PR. Without greatly
increasing the difficulty of the ballot, voters could be allowed to choose
between candidates as well as parties, without the PR character of the
Parliament being affected in any way. One option is to elect MPs in smaller
multi-member constituencies in order to develop a stronger geographical tie
between electors and their representatives. At the moment the regional lists
represent areas so large that any form of local advocacy is entirely lost. A
second option is to adopt the MMP system, with half the members elected from
single-member districts while the other half come from compensatory PR lists.
Both these options were considered by a 12-member Task Team, led by Frederick
van Zyl Slabbert, a former leader of the Democratic Party, and briefed to
consider reform options in 2002. This Task Team had an inbuilt ANC- Independent
Electoral Commission (IEC) majority, and was appointed by the president to
review the electoral system in the light of complaints that the List PR system
did not include adequate geographical representation. It ultimately recommended
that South Africa
should retain its List PR system but change it to a two-tier system, splitting
the country into 69 constituencies electing between three and seven MPs, and
keeping 100 seats as ‘compensatory’ national seats. However, the ANC government
rejected this reform for the 2004 general election.
South African closed List PR ballot paper.
