South African Election Maps and Stats

[Hash]

I'm currently reading something really good about South Africa, and it got me back into South African stuff which is always fascinating. I also tapped into some untapped resources which are excellent and I'm able to make maps of the FPTP single-member ward component in the last local elections (2011), for all municipalities.

I've started out with Johannesburg



I think the main patterns should be quite obvious, though there are a few interesting results here and there.

[Hatman 🍁]

Wow, some of those ANC wards must be quite dense.

[Hash]

Wow, some of those ANC wards must be quite dense.

They're densely populated black townships, such as Soweto. In those places, if the ANC shade is fairly light compared to its surroundings, it is often due to an independent candidate or the IFP.

The black population in Joburg is plurality Zulu, so the IFP has had a little foothold historically, but urban Zulus in Gauteng have historically supported the ANC more than the IFP.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

What are those three blue wards in that dense ANC territory? One even appears to be around 60% DA but surrounded by >70% ANC wards.

[Hash]

What are those three blue wards in that dense ANC territory? One even appears to be around 60% DA but surrounded by >70% ANC wards.

In the Soweto area?

The most solidly DA wards are 17 and 18 which cover Klipspruit West and Eldorado Park, both of which are Coloured neighborhoods (over 90% of the population). The ANC actually won ward 17 in 2006, but that's only because the Independent Democrats (a party which appealed largely to Coloureds, which has now merged into the DA and whose leader is now mayor of Cape Town) did really well there. In Cape Town, the IDs actually won a few wards in 2006 in the Coloured areas in the Flats. In 2011, the DA ate up the ID's old predominantly Coloured vote and also took some Coloured votes from the ANC - I believe the ANC might have won the Coloured vote in 2004, but it certainly lost it in 2009/2011 (in 1994, it is documented that the NP won a plurality or close to it of the Coloured vote).

Further south is ward 9, a DA gain in 2009. Along with ward 10 (a narrow ANC win only because it includes some black townships) it covers Lenasia, a heavily Indian/Asian area (60-80%). The DA probably won Lenasia on the whole in 2011, though not with huge margins. The other DA ward even further south is ward 7, which includes the largely Coloured neighborhood of Ennerdale.

[homelycooking]

Good work. Keep the maps coming!

How about a Durban or a Port Elizabeth map?

[Hash]

Pretoria now



I have a few observations, but they will be for later.

[Hatman 🍁]

So many wards.... I wish we had that many wards in Ottawa.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

So Pretoria is set up like an American city, just with the races inverted.

[Velasco]

Wonderful maps. I find South Africa fascinating too. I'll be waiting for Cape Town.

[Hash]

So many wards.... I wish we had that many wards in Ottawa.

Compared to Canada, South Africa's municipal government is indeed huge. Johannesburg has 130 wards, but single-member wards only account for half of the seats in any municipal council - the other half are elected by list PR. Hence, Johannesburg's city council has 260 members.

Pretoria has 105 wards, and 260 councillors in all. Cape Town has 111 wards and 221 councillors.

It is also worth noting that the cities I've done thus far are all metropolitan municipalities, of which there are 8. In rural areas, there are two levels: the district (which has a council, 40% of which is elected directly by party list PR; the rest nominated by municipalities) which includes a number of municipalities (50% wards+50% PR). Metro municipalities are a kind of unitary authority.

[Stranger in a strange land]

So Pretoria is set up like an American city, just with the races inverted.

Not really, it seems a more apt comparison would be to large cities in Europe, especially France, with a wealthy core and impoverished black and brown suburbs.

[Hash]

So Pretoria is set up like an American city, just with the races inverted.

Not really, it seems a more apt comparison would be to large cities in Europe, especially France, with a wealthy core and impoverished black and brown suburbs.

Pretoria's CBD is actually a fairly low-income and black majority area, as evidenced by the ANC and weak DA wards downtown. The wealthy white Afrikaner areas are actually inner suburbs of Pretoria; the black townships are outer suburbs which aren't part of the old city of Pretoria itself (Mabopane, Soshanguve, Mamelodi, Atteridgeville). Johannesburg is similar, the CBD is black majority and low-income.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

^^^

Basically Apartheid led to some seriously wacky urban geography.

[Kitteh]

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What? Why? To someone with little to no knowledge of SA this seems really counter-intuitive. The only thing I can think of is some kind of Afrikaans-speaking solidarity between Coloured people and white Afrikaners. Seems weird that that would be enough to cause people to vote for a party that was for denying them basic human rights just a few years before.

[Hash]

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What? Why? To someone with little to no knowledge of SA this seems really counter-intuitive. The only thing I can think of is some kind of Afrikaans-speaking solidarity between Coloured people and white Afrikaners. Seems weird that that would be enough to cause people to vote for a party that was for denying them basic human rights just a few years before.

I'm not sure of the exact reasons (but I'm reading a book which will hopefully tell me more), but there's always been an issue of the ANC being perceived as being too much of a "Bantu/black" party. There must also have been an element of some wanting to protect their few privileges, because while Apartheid treated them like sh**t it didn't quite treat them as sub-humans (by which I mean, in the apartheid's racial hierarchy, the Coloureds weren't at the bottom).

[Hash]

Good work. Keep the maps coming!

How about a Durban or a Port Elizabeth map?

Here's Port Elizabeth. For those more or less unaware, it was one of the DA's top targets in 2011, they fell just short of knocking the ANC off but they did win a remarkable 40% of the vote (they won like 28% in 2009, though COPE took 17% and 24% in the 2006 locals). The ANC won 52%, down from 66% in 2006. The map is rather interesting and tells us where the DA's massive surge came from:



For completion's sake, I also did a DA vote by ward:



A 2006 map would be interesting, but maybe later. The DA basically won every white person (really impressive 90% in the cracker Anglo wards down south) but also consolidated the Coloured vote to a very impressive level (65-75% if not more, in general, I'd guess, which is pretty huge). There are some Coloured wards which seem a bit less solidly DA, it is often because the boundaries also include some predominantly black townships. From my anecdotal observations (Google Street View FTW!) some really run-down Coloured precincts might have been a bit less DA than less run-down areas. Maybe. The Coloured vote is a really interesting thing anywhere, so if anybody wants me to dig down to the precinct level for details on Coloured neighborhoods, I will happily oblige.

In contrast, the DA's breakthrough really didn't happen in black townships. They won roughly 1% in the townships (which, being 99% black, can be assumed to have basically no non-black voters), which is still better than 2006 when they probably took below 1%. In most 99% black wards, the COPE placed second and sometimes the UDM (which is strong in Eastern Cape, but not really in Port Elizabeth - it's real base is Umtata, the political base of its leader, Bantu Holomisa, who was the boss of the old Transkei homeland until 94) pushed the DA into fourth.

(and yeah, the random ANC stronghold ward in the south surrounded by 90%+ DA crackerland is a big black township... I guess the rich whites need to close the gap between rich and poor )

Cape Town is next up on the list.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

You must be logged in to read this quote.

What? Why? To someone with little to no knowledge of SA this seems really counter-intuitive. The only thing I can think of is some kind of Afrikaans-speaking solidarity between Coloured people and white Afrikaners. Seems weird that that would be enough to cause people to vote for a party that was for denying them basic human rights just a few years before.

I'm not sure of the exact reasons (but I'm reading a book which will hopefully tell me more), but there's always been an issue of the ANC being perceived as being too much of a "Bantu/black" party. There must also have been an element of some wanting to protect their few privileges, because while Apartheid treated them like sh**t it didn't quite treat them as sub-humans (by which I mean, in the apartheid's racial hierarchy, the Coloureds weren't at the bottom).

Why the NP though? Why not the DA's precursor? (Which actually did pretty lousy that election, perhaps the anti-apartheid whites felt inclined to vote for the Nationals since they were no longer pro-apartheid and were led by the non-odious de Klerk. Maybe Coloureds felt the same way.)

[minionofmidas]

Why would anybody vote for the DA? That makes even less sense in 1994 than it does now, and that's saying something.

No, seriously. The Coloureds' position in urban apartheid South Africa would have been considered privileged, not discriminated. There are far more Blacks than Whites to compare yourself with, and there economic status was more similar to boot.
And the ANC long considered the whole distinction spurious, in some pc-ish "they are Blacks like us" sense originally, but obviously Coloureds did indeed consider themselves a separate distinct community and did not take kindly to being referred to as "so-called 'Coloureds' ".
Where there are no Blacks in the rural West Cape and North Cape, the ANC did receive most of the Coloured vote IIRC.

[Hash]

Yeah, Lewis is correct. The NP did better with urban coloureds than rural coloureds, and that still seems to be the case today.

BRTD, in 1994, the DP was even more of the Rich (Anglo) Whites Party than it is today.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Is there still a significant division in voting patterns between white Anglos and Afrikaners? [Probably stupid question but I don't know much about contemporary SA elections]

[Hash]

Is there still a significant division in voting patterns between white Anglos and Afrikaners? [Probably stupid question but I don't know much about contemporary SA elections]

I never got around to posting my comments on Pretoria, but I was going to say that throughout the white wards in the city - Pretoria's white are of course largely Afrikaner - in 2006, the VF+ won on average 6-15% and often placed a distant second behind the DA. In 2011, the DA really ate into the VF+ vote - hell, in Orania, the DA won 40% against only 50% for the VF+.

The differences had already become lesser by the end of Apartheid, the NP broke through with Anglos in 1966 (in Natal, the NP won like 16% in 1961 but jumped to 40% in 1966 iirc) and henceforth maintained a solid base of support with Anglos to the point where I'd wager that they did roughly as well with Anglos than with Afrikaners in 1989 (the far-right KP pulled a lot of far-right Afrikaner votes from them in the Transvaal and OFS, but it didn't have any sizable Anglo support of course).

[Hash]

DA vote by ward for the two other cities I had already done, revealing some interesting stuff:





I changed the scale to create a lower 0-5% category (and updated PE map accordingly). It is interesting to point out that the DA's performance in black townships in both Joburg and Pretoria was slightly better than in Port Elizabeth, where they consistently took barely 1%. In Joburg and Pretoria, while they fell below 5% in a number of wards, the DA managed up to 7-10% in some black township wards and where they were below 5% they were closer to 5% than to 0%.

In Joburg, this likely had something to do with the DA's mayoral candidate - Mmusi Maimane - a young black from Soweto but also, perhaps, with the incompetence of the incumbent ANC administration which had a terrible record on service delivery. However, Pretoria's DA candidate was some white dude, so I suspect the big reason why the DA did better in Joburg/Pretoria than Port Elizabeth with blacks is because the COPE was a bigger factor in Port Elizabeth. It had won 17% in 2009 and while its 4% in 2011 was an utter disaster for an epic fail of a party, it won around 5-10% in the black wards and placed consistent distant seconds behind the ANC.

[minionofmidas]

Is there still a significant division in voting patterns between white Anglos and Afrikaners? [Probably stupid question but I don't know much about contemporary SA elections]

Statistically there ought to be. But it would be more of a Durban vs Rest of Country division in practice.

[Kitteh]

Hashemite, do you think you could do vote strength maps for COPE in PE? Looking at the 2009 results it looks like they got some votes from blacks but also did well among  coloureds (Northern Cape was their best province, IIRC, and looking at the map on wiki it looks like they actually won a few wards in rural WC/NC that I think are mostly coloured). I'd be interested to see how well they did in some of the coloured areas of PE.

On a related note, I'm wondering whether COPE is taking more votes from the ANC or the DA at this point. From what I understand, COPE's vote mostly comes from people who used to vote for the ANC but don't like them anymore but can't bring themselves to vote for the DA. The DA seems to think that COPE is taking black votes from the ANC (which was the DA's entire strategy for winning PE in 2011) but given what you said about Joburg and Pretoria I wonder if a lot of COPE people would vote for the DA if COPE disappeared.

EDIT: I just rechecked wiki and it looks like those wards I thought were COPE wards were actually ID wards *facepalm*. In my defense, the colors are pretty close.