The honeymoon is over for South African democracy

As the world confronts the biggest year of elections in history – or as some have termed it, the biggest test of the health of democracy – these questions have never been more important. More than four billion people – more than half of the world’s population across more than 40 countries – will go to the polls in 2024. What will drive them to first vote in the first place, and then to choose which box to cross in the voting booth?

As Valentina Bali and Lindon Robison of the University of Michigan have noted, this puzzle has been tackled by scholars at length yet remains unsettled.

In short, the academic theories range from more selfishly driven motivations to vote – for example, benefits potentially forthcoming from an elected representative – to those that are more altruistic and relate to a sense of civic duty. The truth is surely some mix of both.

These varying factors are most compelling when large-scale shifts in voting behaviour occur. For example, in a survey released last week by the New York Times, it is clear that exactly such a secular shift is happening in the US among non-white voters. The survey shows that Biden is currently leading Trump by only 56% to 44% among voters of colour. In 2020, the last time these two men ran for the White House, the gap between them among the same electorate was almost 50 percentage points.

Interestingly this is not a recent phenomenon. Data from previous election surveys show that the Democrats’ advantage over the Republicans among black, Latino and Asian Americans peaked in the 1960s and has been steadily declining.

There are three explanations offered. 

First, it is due to fading memories and weakening ties. Americans of colour who lived through the civil rights era still support the Democrats but younger generations are wavering as those years become more distant.

Second is the weakening correlation between income and voter choice in US politics. As John Burn-Murdoch points out in the Financial Times, the image of the GOP as the party of “wealthy country club elites is dimming, opening the door to working- and middle-class voters of all ethnicities”. A similar trend was noticed in the UK in the last election, as the “red wall” of traditionally safe northern Labour seats voted overwhelmingly for the Tories.

Finally, many of America’s non-white voters have long held much more conservative views than their voting patterns would suggest. The shift seen over the past 50 years therefore is not so much natural Democrats becoming disillusioned but natural Republicans realising they have been voting for the wrong party.

Read more in Daily Maverick: 2024 elections

This is shown by US political scientists Ismail K White and Chryl N Laird whose book Steadfast Democrats demonstrates the mismatch between many black Americans’ policy preferences and votes. This is particularly evident on issues such as gay rights or gun control, where much larger numbers of black, Latino and Asian conservatives have tended to vote Democrat. History, culture and community have long overridden this misalignment between non-white conservatives and choice of vote.

The shift among South African voters