Blog 7: Duverger's Law and South Africa

            In any state, there are a limited number of effective political parties – parties that actually have power and influence within the government. Maurice Duverger, a French sociologist, theorized that the effective number of parties within a state is a function of that state’s electoral rules, the rules by which members of the legislature are selected (Sartori). There are two primary democratic systems of electoral rules: Single-Member-District Plurality, SMDP, and proportional representation, PR (Shively). Duverger’s Law states that SMDP systems limit the effective number of parties to two, while PR systems allow multiple parties to be effective (Sartori).

            South Africa has two bodies within the legislature, but to examine Duverger’s Law, we will use the National Assembly, the lower house. Parliamentary elections are held every five years, and members of the National Assembly are elected to five-year terms (Country Profile). There are 400 seats in the National Assembly, and members are elected using a closed-list proportional representation system (IPU). Proportional representation systems primarily gives political parties representation “in the legislative body…roughly proportional to their strength in the electorate” (Shively). In a closed-list PR system, the state is divided into different regions, and political parties provide a ranked list of potential candidates for office to the election commission. After the election is held, the election commission “determines the number of seats each party should have, based on its proportion of the vote, and counts down the ranked list from the top, awarding places to that number of candidates” (Shively).

Regarding district magnitude, South Africa has ten multi-member constituencies – one known as the ‘national’ constituency, while the nine others represent the nine provinces (IPU). Elections to the National Assembly do not use hybrid electoral rules, just a closed-list PR system. The formula the South African election commission uses to allocate legislative seats is known as the Droop quota (Elklit). The Droop quota formula divides the total amount of votes by the amount of legislative seats plus one, and then adds one. The resulting number is the Droop quota. The number of times the Droop quota solidly divides into the amount of votes for a party is equal to the amount of seats that will be allocated to the party. In South Africa, this has led to each party winning four legislative seats for each percentage of the total vote won (IPU).South African National Assembly elections use proportional representation electoral rules.

In South Africa’s 2009 National Assembly elections, twenty-six parties received votes; however, not all of these parties are effective. Only thirteen of those parties received seats in parliament, but there aren’t thirteen effective political parties (South Africa). To calculate the effective number of political parties, the following equation is used: Neff = 1/Σ(p2), where Neff is the number of effective parties, and p is the proportion of the vote each party received (Laakso). In the 2009 parliamentary elections, only four political parties received over 1% of the vote: African National Congress (ANC), 65.9%; Democratic Alliance (DA), 16.7%; Congress of the People (COPE), 7.4%; and Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), 4.55% (South Africa). These parties are the only ones needed to use in the algorithm. Once the equation is completed, the resulting number for South Africa is 2.1. It can be concluded that there are two effective parties within South Africa, with many smaller parties, accounted for by the .1.

South Africa’s electoral system, proportional representation, and its number of effective parties, two, do not support Duverger’s Law. Under Duverger’s Law, South Africa should have a multiparty system, created from its electoral system of PR. Instead, South Africa has only two effective parties. While this doesn’t disprove Duverger’s Law, it contradicts it and does not support it.

CITATIONS

Sartori, Giovanni. Comparative Constitutional Engineering, An Inquiry into Structures, Incentives and Outcomes. New York: New York UP, 1994. Print.

Shively, W. Phillips. Power & Choice: An Introduction to Political Science. 13th ed. New York: McGraw Hill, 2012. Print.

"Country Profile: South Africa." ElectionGuide. Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening (CEPPS), 11 Dec. 2010. Web. 1 Nov. 2012. 

"IPU PARLINE Database: SOUTH AFRICA (National Assembly), Electoral System."PARLINE Database. Inter-Parliamentary Union, 2012. Web. 01 Nov. 2012. 

Elklit, Jørgen. "What Electoral Systems Are Available Out There? An International Perspective on the Current Debate in South Africa." (2002). Eisa.org.za. Web. 1 Nov. 2012.

"South Africa: 2009 National Assembly Election Results." EISA. Electoral Institute for the Sustainability of Democracy in Africa, Apr. 2009. Web. 01 Nov. 2012. 

Laakso, Markku. The "Effective" Number of Parties: "A Measure with Application to West Europe". Comparative Political Studies, 12:1 (1979:Apr.) p.3.