Party over outsiders, centre over branch: how ANC dominance works at the community level in South Africa

Common to most accounts of South African electoral politics is some version of voter loyalty or party identification. In contrast to arguments that focus on voter behaviour, although less common, are views that point to the reinforcement of voter choice through the relationship of the African National Congress (ANC) and party-state to key civil society and business allies. This article explores this party capture of political organisation at the crucial, and yet understudied, level of the local community or settlement. Drawing on case-study work in Cape Town and Johannesburg, it is demonstrated how the attempted dominance of political society over civil society at national level is reproduced at the most local of levels through a combination of ideological and instrumental factors. Key to the former is the idea of the ANC’s entitlement to rule implied by liberation nationalism. Key to the latter are the forms of patronage politics enabled by the ‘party-state’, where it exists. The result is the representational privileging of political actors over civil society actors, and the party ‘centre’ over branches. Notably, the attempt to construct the local ‘party-society’ is always partial and often weak, not least due to governance failures of various kinds. This leads to periodic crises and popular protest, but the party dominance of representational choice means that new leaders often emerge in the name of the ANC and its allies rather than against it.