Racial Politics and Campaign Strategy in South Africa's 2009 Election

Abstract

South Africa's 2009 election featured competition between the ruling African National Congress (ANC), the steadily improving Democratic Alliance (DA), and the newly formed ANC splinter party, the Congress of the People (COPE). In 2009, national-level parties faced the same strategic imperative as in previous elections: to gain support among the Black majority. But the emergence of COPE had potentially important implications for election strategy. Competition was no longer only between the liberation party (the ANC) and the successor of an apartheid-era party (the DA). COPE had its own set of liberation-linked leaders that presented a new challenge to both the ANC and the DA. This paper examines the main parties' use of candidate lists, voter outreach, and campaign rhetoric to target the Black majority in 2009. It updates and expands previous studies of racial politics in South Africa, providing novel empirical data on the campaign tactics of the ANC, DA, and COPE.