Browsing by Subject "Democracy"

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
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    Consociational democracy : the model and its relevance to conflict regulation in South Africa
    (1989) Cobb, Shane Kent
    The purpose of this paper is to survey the literature of consociational theory, assess its validity as a conceptual model, and to analyse both its relevance and utility as a potential framework of conflict regulation in South Africa. The paper is divided into five chapters: an overview of consociational theory as it is presented by its leading exponents; a critique of the theory's methodology and major suppositions; a modified model of consociational democracy in light of the theoretical criticisms; an application and evaluation of the modified model to South Africa; and, finally, some observations about consociational democracy's possible viability as a transitory mechanism between the present system and black majority-rule in a unitary system. The objective is to illustrate that consociational government is, normatively, an inadequate constitutional system for South Africa and, more broadly, for polities characterised by extreme ethnic or economic conflict.
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    Democracy as a Lesser Evil: Testing the Churchill Notion of Democracy in South Africa and South Korea
    (2004) Shin, Doh; Mattes, Robert
    Winston Churchill asserted in 1947 that “democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” To date, this lesser-evil notion of democracy has been tested only in the post-communist societies of Eastern and Central Europe. As a result, little is known about how useful, or valid, this notion of democracy as a lesser evil is for analysing the popular perceptions of democracy among the mass publics of new democracies in other regions. To fill this gap in existing literature, this study analyses public opinion data from South Africa and South Korea. Our analysis of these data reveals that the Churchillian notion of democracy as a lesser evil is of limited use as an alternative paradigm for the study of democratisation, especially from the perspective of ordinary citizens in the midst of that political experience.
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    Democracy, traditional leadership and the international economy in South Africa
    (CSSR and SALDRU, 2015-05-28) Koelble, Thomas
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    The democratic impact of cultural values in Africa and Asia: The cases of South Korea and South Africa
    (2005) Mattes, Robert; Shin, Doh Chull
    Traditional cultural values have long been seen by scholars as a significant obstacle to political and economic development in the post colonial world, especially in Africa and Asia. Publics which prioritise things like the collective good of the family and community over procedure and individual rights, grant uncritical respect to authority and social hierarchy, and identify themselves primarily as members of sub-national kinship groups rather than modern nationstates, are said to be particularly inhospitable places for representative democracies and market economies to take root.
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    The Impact of HIV/AIDS on Local-Level Democracy: A Case Study of the Ethekwini Municipality, Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa
    (2003) Manning, Ryann
    The aim of this paper is to provide a preliminary analysis of how the HIV/AIDS epidemic already does and increasingly will impact on local-level democracy, and to recommend areas for future research and analysis on this topic. Many people have speculated that HIV/AIDS will detrimentally affect democracy and democratic systems of governance, but very little research has been done to support this claim. In an effort to fill this gap, this research examines the impact of HIV/AIDS on one key component of a democratic system: local-level government. Municipalities provide a large proportion of essential basic services, and also represent one of the primary opportunities for public participation and decision-making at a community level. If the epidemic causes municipal governments to falter or fail, the implications for service provision, for public support of democracy, for law and order, and for political stability could be significant.
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    The Institutions of Representative Democracy
    (2004) Nijzink, Lia; Piombo, Jessica
    This paper charts the development of the two institutions most central to the nature of representative democracy in South Africa: the electoral system and the National Assembly.2 It reviews how developments since 1994 have shaped the institutional context in which political parties operate and compete for power. The paper first considers how the National Assembly has developed over the past ten years, reviewing the performance of parliament and its role in the consolidation of democracy. The second part of the paper focuses on the electoral system, reviewing the debate around electoral reform and discussing changes that have been introduced since 1999. In the conclusion, we suggest what the implications of these institutional developments are for the future of representative democracy in South Africa.
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    The state of the labour market in South Africa after the first decade of democracy
    (CSSR and SALDRU, 2015-05-28) Woolard, Ingrid; Burger, Rulof
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    Towards the Design of a Networked Social Services Media Model to Promote Democratic Community Participation in South African Schools
    (2013) Monson, Michael Leslie; Brown, Irwin
    The belief that society benefits from the adoption of democratic practices and a desire to improve schooling in South Africa, motivate this research. The social objective of the research is therefore to determine what are the causes of the persistent failure of the South African schooling system and to what extent community participation may serve to resolve them. The technological objective is to determine the feasibility of utilising social media for addressing social problems through enabling participative democracy. The potential for community participation in South African schools is therefore viewed through the lens of Internet enabled participative democracy. A design science-inspired research framework is devised in a qualitative study adopting a critical interpretevist epistemology. The study entails three phases applying a mixing of methods to perform critical research, context-based evaluation and critical interpretive evaluation. The first phase reveals the fundamental problems impacting the schooling education system in South Africa and determines that the underlying cause for their persistence lies in a systemic problem of conflicting legislation and policies caused by ideological differences within the ruling tripartite alliance. It further identifies through critical inference, specific practices by school communities which could improve the education system by participative, democratic action. The second phase evaluates the capacity for selected, popularly used social media artefacts to serve as communication and collaboration tools, in the schooling context, to enable community participation. These are found to be inadequate. The third phase is an evaluation of the technologies capable of facilitating activities required to achieve democratic participation of communities in schools and results in the description of an artefact that could enable a “networked social service media” system. The paper substantiates the notion that an appropriately designed, Internet enabled social media artefact, can promote the participation of communities in schools in South Africa.
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    Who holds power in post-apartheid South Africa?
    (2007) Seekings, Jeremy
    The transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa, marked above all by the election in 1994 of a government led by the African National Congress (ANC) and headed by President Nelson Mandela, represented a milestone not only for South Africa but for Africa generally. The transition meant the end of formal colonial or settler rule in Africa.? On one level, the new South African democracy appears robust and substantive. Whilst there has been no turnover in office at the national level, free and fair legislative elections have been held regularly, with a universal franchise and multi-party competition, and there is an independent judiciary, a critical press, and a vigorous civil society.? But there are at least two grounds for questioning the quality of the new democracy. First, the strength of the ANC undermines the constitutional separation of powers and the real accountability of the executive to the electorate.? Secondly, the ANC is widely accused of having 'betrayed' the working-class and poor by adopting neo-liberal policies that serve the interests of capital and therefore represent a continuity from the apartheid era. Whilst there is some merit in each critique, the formal procedures of representative democracy are not inconsequential, and (more importantly) a range of classes and interest-groups besides 'capital' wield power, albeit in different ways.