A Comparative Case Study of the Voting Behaviour of Poor People in Three Selected South African Communities

Abstract

In African elections, the period between polling and announcement can be protracted and tense. In the best cases, this intermission is marked by hopeful candidates urging tense supporters to stay calm. In the worst cases, such periods are used by politicians to hurl accusations of fraud back and forth to work up partisanship and devalue electoral institutions. The days between an election and its results are stressful because incomplete information about this constituency or that trickles out, but partisans have few systematic ways to compare these data with past results or exit polling, and worry that the missing data are somehow being tampered with. This paper shows how OLS regression using past results to fill in partial results can not only reduce uncertainty in the short term, but may also point out whether or not withheld results seem plausible. What began as a simple social media experiment is presented here as an elegant formula that accurately predicts outcomes across Ghana's Fourth Republic and in Nigeria's 2015 presidential election. This accuracy was achieved with as little as 10% of the results in, and extremely biased samples.

The politics of social assistance in South Africa: How protests and electoral politics shape the Child Support Grant

“…It is very likely that a similar mechanism is at work today in developing countries as well. Apart from this possible contentious political perspective, a few political studies pinpoint electoral competition as the driver of social assistance expansion or distribution in their case studies of Turkey, Mexico, India, and South Africa (Aytaç 2014; De La O 2013; Thachil 2014; Zucco 2013; Sadie, Patel, and Baldry 2016). However, contentious and electoral politics have been analyzed as independent explanatory variables, indicating that the social policy effect of their interaction has not been examined, and only their individual effects have been considered (Yoruk, 2012).…”

“…Furthermore, Patel states that the poor were concerned about the continuation of their protection if they voted for an opposition party (Patel 2016; Patel, Sadie, and Bryer 2018). Thus, electoral competition and populist policies may be another factor that caused further expansion of the CSG (Patel and Plagerson 2016; Sadie, Patel, and Baldry 2016; Patel 2016). The role of contentious politics in determining social assistance as a means of containment of political mobilization and grassroots organizations has been largely unnoticed despite high number of protests per year.…”