If you have any interest in American politics whatsoever you really should bookmark FiveThirtyEight, which does fantastic analysis (usually with complicated statistical analysis that they thankfully are able to make accessible to the rest of us) about a whole host of issues but with particular strenghts on electoral politics. With the upcoming midterm elections in the US you should make 538 a part of your daily reading routine.
I mention the site today specifically not only because it is worth your while, but because today, by way of analogy with the recent British elections and thinking of flaws in representative systems more generally, it posted an interesting piece on South African electoral politics during the Apartheid era. There will be little new here for specialists, but for most it is worth the reminder that the architects of Apartheid, the National Party, benefited tremendously from quirks in the system that allowed them to defeat a United Party that nonetheless had greater popular support among the white voters who made up the country’s electorate.
UP victory in the elections from 1948 would not have represented a panacea for the majority of South Africans — there was rigorous segregation in South Africa prior to 1948, there would have been rigorous segregation in South Africa after 1948 even had the Nats not gained power, especially because even had they garnered more accurately proportional seats in parliament they would have wielded considerable power. Nonetheless, the flaws in the country’s electoral mechanism helped fuel the political system that emerged after the 1948 elections.
