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The Role of Social and Economic Rights in Supporting Opposition in Postapartheid South Africa Lauren Paremoer and Courtney Jung In 1995, Courtney Jung and Ian Shapiro published an article about South Africa’s democratic transition.1 In it they argued that South Africa’s negotiated settlement had yielded a constitution that was more focused on guaranteeing representation for minority whites than on entrenching opposition . The interim constitution included power-sharing clauses that reserved seats in the executive branch for all of the major parties and had very weak mechanisms for ensuring a strong institutionalized opposition, either from minority parties or from dissenting back-benchers within the major parties. Jung and Shapiro argued that a strong institutionalized opposition was the key to a healthy democracy, and they were not alone in warning that the gravest danger to South African democracy would be the lack of opposition to the African National Congress (ANC). Although the final constitution did not include many of the articles they had been most critical of, most important dropping the guarantee of power sharing, it retained all of the constitutional provisions that strengthened the ruling party and weakened the opposition. The National Party (NP) dropped out of the executive in 1996 to take up the role of opposition, but in the 1999 election the ANC won an even larger majority of the vote. The NP subsequently disintegrated, and the Democratic Party took up the mantle of official opposition, positioning itself as a watchdog party. Since renamed the Democratic Alliance, the party retained the role of the dominant opposition party in the 2009 election by winning 16.7 percent of the national vote, an outright majority in the Western Cape Province and the second-highest share of votes in four provinces. The third largest party, the Congress of the 200 Lauren Paremoer and Courtney Jung People (COPE), was a breakaway faction of the ANC that formed in 2008 and captured 7.5 percent of the national vote and the official opposition in four provinces in 2009. Despite the consolidation of two stronger opposition parties between 1994 and 2009, the ANC still controls just under two-thirds of all parliamentary seats. Given the strong institutional incentives created by the South African electoral system to prioritize party loyalty, legislative oversight of an ANC executive is likely to remain limited even in the presence of a more consolidated opposition. This does not mean, however, that the ANC faces no opposition. In 1995, Jung and Shapiro speculated that opposition to the ANC might in the future come from within the party itself, and that the party might split among its competing constituencies. The ANC, they noted, was a broad church. The party’s liberation struggle heritage carried sufficient moral weight that it could encompass social groups with opposing interests, but they anticipated that disaffection with the ruling party could soon break out into open opposition from civil society groups affiliated with the ANC. In the period since 1994, opposition has been most consistently voiced by community groups and nongovernmental organizations whose members come from the ANC or from breakaway factions of the ANC. This trend is likely to continue. South African civil society has been vocal in its opposition to many government policies, taking the ANC to task for failing to provide adequate housing, abrogating its commitment to health care, failing to provide sufficient jobs, failing to guarantee a living wage, and failing to deliver the social and welfare services it has promised. Although this is not the kind of institutionalized opposition that Jung and Shapiro had in mind in 1995, it is certainly opposition, and it is playing an important role in maintaining democratic participation and deliberation. Despite ANC hegemony in Parliament, civil society has sometimes succeeded in holding the ANC accountable (Mattison 2004; Ballard, Habib, and Valodia 2006). One reason why popular participation has been effective in playing this role is that, while the final constitution dropped the guarantee of power sharing, it added a commitment to a raft of justiciable social and economic rights. Section 24 of the constitution guarantees everyone’s right to a safe and healthy environment and requires the state to protect the environment. Section 25(5) requires the state to enable citizens to gain equitable access to land. Section 26 provides a right to access to adequate housing and prohibits arbitrary evictions. Section 27 guarantees access to health care services, suf- ficient food and water, and social security, and prohibits the...

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