Geography and voting: the growth of urban opposition in South Africa two decades after democratisation

Abstract

The results of the 2016 local government elections in South Africa provided a new opportunity to assess voting trends and to explore the synergies of demographics, geography and voting behaviour. Pre-election protests and polls suggested haemorrhaging of support levels for the ruling African National Congress (ANC). Increased support was thus predicted for opposition parties on the political right and left of the ANC, especially for the Democratic Alliance (DA) and the Economic Freedom Front, respectively. These predictions were realised when support for the ANC declined from 62 to 54% nationally, and the ANC received less than half of votes cast in five of the country’s eight metropolitan municipalities. This paper interrogates the election outcomes in the municipal wards of the two largest metropoles, Johannesburg and Cape Town, to determine dynamics of the neighbourhood level changes in voting patterns.