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Political Behavior

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29.04.2019 | Original Paper

Racial Isolation Drives Racial Voting: Evidence from the New South Africa

verfasst von: Daniel de Kadt, Melissa L. Sands

Erschienen in: Political Behavior | Ausgabe 1/2021

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Abstract

How does local demographic context shape political behavior? We investigate how racial isolation, one of the natural consequences of structural segregation, is related to racial voting in South Africa. Using a variety of new datasets, which include for the first time high resolution census data from before the end of apartheid, we leverage plausibly exogenous variation in the extent to which local segregation persisted after the end of apartheid to study this relationship. Whites who are more isolated engage in more racial voting, measured as the probability of voting along racial lines, against black political parties. Using geo-referenced survey data for over 39,000 people we then present individual level evidence consistent with our findings, and discuss potential mechanisms.

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The decision to focus on whites’ voting behavior and survey responses is not free of normative or scientific concerns. We take this decision not because we believe white political behavior is any more important than non-white political behavior (this is trivially not true), but because black South Africans were highly mobile after the end of apartheid. Given their position of political privilege and power, whites were confronted in the post-apartheid period with changes to the demographics of their lived contexts, while black South Africans quite literally left behind old lived contexts and built new ones.

For 2011 there were 4277 wards in South Africa. We have balanced panel data for roughly 2900 of these wards. Those we are missing are typically in the former homeland areas of South Africa, which by design have few whites.

As discussed later, our results are robust to different codings of this outcome, for instance, including other black parties along with the ANC, or measuring instead the propensity to vote for white parties like the Democratic Alliance or the Freedom Front Plus.

The census data from 1991 was collected in May 1991, before the legislation dismantling the Group Areas Act and associated Acts was passed. Of course, there was some mobility in the cities before 1991.

Guidelines for the Planning of Native Urban Areas (NTS 4271 6 120/313)

Note that the full dataset used in this study includes 2900 wards across the country, a map of which is presented in the appendix. This map of Johannesburg is only intended to demonstrate our data.

In 2011 there were 4277 wards in South Africa, electorally applicable for the 2011 local government and 2014 national elections.

There are no maps in existence for any earlier censuses at a high resolution level.

There were separate censuses for three of the Bantustans, but matching these with the available digital shapefiles has proven challenging. Fortunately, we feel confident that the missing observations are for the most part not relevant to this study. However, to be conservative we include in our ward level specifications a municipality (\(n=234\)) fixed effect, and so consider only variation within municipalities; as a result, rural municipalities in which there is no variation in levels of isolation, like the Bantustans, are of little inferential value.

Throughout, we refer to the data as measured at the EA level for ease, but this proviso should be noted.

The 1999 data is available at the voting district level (\(n=14,659\)). We converted a shapefile of the voting districts to centroid points, then spatially joined this with the 2011 ward boundaries, and aggregated the voting data up to the 2011 ward level.

We also computed Roughness, developed by Wilson et al (2007), and defined as the difference between the maximum and the minimum value of a cell and its eight surrounding cells. This measure is very highly correlated with TRI, and the results are almost indistinguishable.

Again, this map of Johannesburg is only intended to demonstrate our data, which includes most of the country.

There are roughly 217 municipalities for the 2900 wards in our data.

The difference between the first quartile of white isolation and the third quartile is 0.44 on a 0 to 1 scale. Thus we would predict ANC vote share to decrease by around 0.3, or 30%.

In columns (1) through (6) of Table 3, we subset to self-reported voters only, about 60% of respondents. When we control for 1991 covariates the number of wards in the dataset drops considerably as we lose areas with no data in 1991, leaving approximately 18,700 observations. In columns (7) through (9) we include non-voters, and attrition in the sample is due to missingness of covariates and 1991 data.

The first quartile of WhiteIsolation is 0.0036; the third quartile is 0.4778. Thus, all else equal, an individual at the first quartile is \((-0.735) + (0.0036* -0.149)= -0.736\), or 73.6% points less likely to support the ANC, and an individual at the third quartile is \((-0.735) + (0.4778 * -0.149)= -0.806\), or 80.6% points less likely to support the ANC, compared to a non-white individual.

We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this analysis.

As shown in the appendix, the statistical significance of these results depends on the choice of spatial fixed effects. Without the inclusion of any spatial fixed effects the result is as expected, and statistically significant at conventional levels. The same is true with the inclusion of provincial (\(m = 9\)) spatial fixed effects. However, with the inclusion of municipality spatial fixed effects, the estimated coefficients on white isolation do not attain statistical significance. This is not surprising given that with a sample size of roughly 2,500, municipal spatial fixed effects (\(m = 234\)) are a particularly tough empirical test. Still, all point estimates are negative, as expected.

This data was generously provided to us by Lightstone Property and the Gauteng City-Region Observatory.

This figure is calculated by dividing the total number of deeds transfers in each year by the total number of formal households in the 1991 census, for the EAs covered by the deeds data. This is a conservative estimate given that we consider formal households only.

We thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.

The appendix also includes these analyses for subsets of white respondents only and black respondents only, respectively. These again reveal estimated coefficients close to zero, none of which are statistically significant.

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Titel: Racial Isolation Drives Racial Voting: Evidence from the New South Africa
verfasst von: Daniel de Kadt
Melissa L. Sands
Publikationsdatum: 29.04.2019
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Political Behavior / Ausgabe 1/2021
Print ISSN: 0190-9320
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-6687
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-019-09547-8

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