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Failure to launch? The lack of populist attitudinal activation in the 2019 South African elections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2023

Robert Nyenhuis Open the ORCID record for Robert Nyenhuis [Opens in a new window]  and
Collette Schulz-Herzenberg Open the ORCID record for Collette Schulz-Herzenberg [Opens in a new window]
Robert Nyenhuis*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, California State University, 3801 W. Temple Avenue, Building 94, Room 303, Pomona, CA 91768-4055, Pomona, USA
Collette Schulz-Herzenberg*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Stellenbosch, 6th Floor, Arts Building, Cnr. Merriman Ave. and Ryneveld St., Stellenbosch 7600, South Africa
*
Corresponding author: Robert Nyenhuis. Email: renyenhuis@cpp.edu
Email: csh@sun.ac.za
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Abstract

Do South Africans hold strong populist attitudes? If so, who is the ‘populist citizen’ and have these attitudes been activated in the electoral arena? In this article, we make use of 2019 Comparative National Elections Project (CNEP) data to answer these questions. We find that populist attitudes tend to vary across levels of education, geographic location and racial groups. Given the constant supply of populist rhetoric from the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), we expected this party to marshal electoral support from citizens holding the strongest populist attitudes. However, we contend that the party's racialised populism and radicalism ultimately handicapped it at the ballot box. The EFF ultimately suffered from citizens’ mistrust, its lack of credibility and savvy political moves by the ANC ahead of the election.

Keywords

PopulismVoting BehaviourSouth AfricaElections
Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 61 , Issue 2 , June 2023 , pp. 257 - 279
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

*

The authors would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their useful feedback which has improved this paper. We would like to thank Matthias Krönke and Graham Odell for their wonderful comments on earlier versions of the paper. We are also grateful to the South African National Research Foundation (Grant No. 118512) for funding the 2019 survey data analysed for this paper.

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