Do southern Africa’s dominant-party systems affect popular attitudes?

Among the most distinctive features of Southern African politics is the region’s preponderance of one-party dominant systems. Considerable effort has been made to explain the unusual phenomenon with some analysts emphasizing the potential of such imbalances of power to undermine the effectiveness of a democracy’s institutions. However, political science has only just begun to study the repercussions the status quo may have for political culture in the region. Using survey data collected across the continent, this paper shifts the focus to this unexplored link between dominance and culture, aiming to shed some light on the relationship by studying the effect dominant party systems have on three specific political attitudes in Africa: demand for democracy, evaluation of the supply of democracy, and pluralism. The academic literature on Southern Africa’s dominant party systems has produced a theoretical distinction between two types of dominance. On the one hand is simple dominance, characterized only by long-term electoral success by a single party. On the other hand is dominance by parties who emerged from national liberation movements. Some analysts have argued that the ideological orientation of liberation parties and their unique claim to the right to rule renders them incompatible with essential features of democracy. This paper investigates the possibility that these distinct varieties of dominance have distinct effects on political attitudes. The results of the analyses conducted here offer strong evidence that dominant party systems do have implications for mass attitudes. Further, this research finds strong support for the argument that the nature of a party’s dominance matters, as means comparisons and regression analyses showed that the effects of dominance on popular attitudes were considerably stronger in systems where the dominant party was descended from a national liberation movement