Political Institutions in New Democracies: (Not so) Hidden Majoritarianism in Post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract

This article examines the applicability of an analytic framework widely used in comparative studies of new and old democracies. In particular, it investigates if and how political institutions in newly established democracies in Africa may be classified along the lines put forward by Arend Lijphart (1999), who distinguishes between majoritarian and consensus democracy. We show that a distinction is evident in the formal institutional sense and that African new democracies differ (somewhat) if classified institutionally as either majoritarian or consensual. However, looking more closely to South Africa as an example of a consensus type of democracy, we also argue that the distribution of power, embedded in both the wider informal practices and the nature of the party system, significantly affects the way this formally consensual democracy works in practice. On this basis, we argue that (a) the consensual appearance of democracy on the basis of formal institutional criteria may be misleading; and (b) that because the party system affects the meaning of the other institutional criteria, the criteria used to distinguish between a majoritarian and consensus democracy should be assigned a relative weight.