Wayne Sussman on Local Government Elections
1 December 2021
What just happened? Join Wayne Sussman for a tour through the 2021 local government elections. Now that the figures have been crunched and studied, Wayne Sussman, fondly known as 'the Elections Geek', will unpack the results of the November elections and share his insights. Did the ANC and DA do as badly as reported? How did the EFF perform? What is there to make of the rise of ActionSA, Freedom Front Plus and the Patriotic Alliance? Sussman will look at the current coalition politics, affecting an unprecedented number of municipal councils, and what this mean for the next five years...
Local Government Elections 2021-Does SA have a religiously motivated electorate?
26 October 2021
The webinar is based on a paper written by Dr Siphiwe Dube titled A Religiously Motivated Electorate in South Africa? South Africa is a predominantly religious country with four main religions Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, traditional African religions and Judaism. Dr Dube’s paper explores the intersection of religion and elections in the context of South Africa. It does so through a comparative analysis of the South African context in relation to other African countries where similar work exists. The aim is to contextualise the South African experience within the broader African context, as well as to point out some differences that...
Voter Mobilisation: Making voting appealing to South Africa non-voters
14 October 2021
How to get non-voters to vote As a measure of participation, voter turnout is a good indicator of the health of a democracy. In South Africa, the IEC calculates voter turnout as a percentage of the number of registered voters that vote on election day. But that number doesn’t tell us the full story. Not everyone that is eligible to vote registers to vote. An estimated 13 million eligible voters have not registered to vote for the 1 November local government elections. Join Nompumelelo Runji; Policy and Political Analysis from Critical ThinkAR at the next Business Day DialoguesLIVE, in partnership...
Unpacking the South African Non-voter
8 December 2020
This webinar launches an in-depth research paper by Dr Collette Schulz-Herzenberg that delves into this crucial topic. On 8 May 2019, South Africans voted in their sixth democratic national and provincial elections. A record 26.7 million eligible South Africans registered to vote in the election. The registered population represented 74.6% of the total voting age population, of over 35.8 million. Over 17.6 million voters participated on election day, yet electoral participation decreased quite dramatically, accelerating the steady decline in voter turnout across South Africa’s previous democratic elections. Voter turnout is regarded as a crucial indicator of the vitality and health of a democracy. High...