Trust in the Post-Apartheid Government of South Africa: The Roles of Identity and Policy Performance

Abstract

The article compares the roles of identity and performance in explaining patterns of popular trust in the post-apartheid government of South Africa. Empirical evidence from two different national surveys, conducted in 1998 and 2006 respectively, suggests that citizens' identities were important, but that their evaluations of government performance also affected how much they trusted their national, provincial and local governments. Theories of identity and performance should therefore be seen as complementing each other in explaining trust in the government of South Africa. In the most recent survey, however, the importance of racial identity has declined, and performance evaluations appear as the more important source of such trust.