How things fall apart

Abstract

The politics of African democracies is marked by a curious disjuncture: in spite of severe social diversity and proportional electoral arrangements, dominant parties abound. This peculiarity frustrates the design of constitutional experts, who expect proportional electoral arrangements to translate social cleavages into discrete political parties. In such cases, it follows that the dominant political party – rather than parliament – becomes the primary site of accommodation between competing social formations. Little, however, is known of how groups vie for power within Africa’s dominant political parties; electoral law is largely silent on the subject of intraparty democracy. Under what conditions do dominant parties – understood as coalitions of social formations – remain cohesive? We address this question by looking at the process of candidate selection, often considered ‘one of the best points at which to observe the distribution of power within the party’ (Schattschneider, 1970 [1942]: 64). We conduct a comparative case study of two dominant parties in South Africa and Namibia, using evidence drawn from primary party documentation and interviews with party leaders, officials, candidates and members. We find that inclusive candidate selection mechanisms can stabilize factional competition, while exclusive mechanisms, conversely, can presage elite rupture within the dominant party.