Parties' motivations for electoral reform under the democratic transition in South Africa

Abstract

At the beginning of the 90s, South Africa initiated its political transition with the transformation of the electoral system being one of the key items on the negotiation agenda. Transition in these regimes is less a struggle over the right of political actors to hold diverse political beliefs than over the extension of the franchise to previously excluded sections of the population. Following the literature on party motivations, I analyze the various motivations of the political actors engaged in the process of institutional design for electoral change. In this case study, I identify explanations based on office-seeking and policy-seeking preferences in the strategies of the political parties that participated in the negotiation of the institutional change during the democratic transition. As a result, South Africa reformed the electoral law used under the authoritarian regime and moved from a low inclusive majoritarian electoral system to a high inclusive proportional electoral system in the new democratic regime.