South Africa’s 2016 Municipal Elections: How the ANC and DA Leveraged Twitter to Capture the Urban Vote
This paper focuses on how South Africa’s governing party, the African
National Congress (ANC), and main opposition, the Democratic Alliance
(DA), leveraged microblogging site Twitter. This was part of their urban
election campaign arsenal in the 2016 local government elections (LGE) to
promote party-political digital issue ownership within an urban context.
Using each party’s corpus of 2016 election-related tweets and election
manifestos, this three-phased grounded theory study found that each party
used Twitter as a digital political communication platform to communicate
their election campaigns. The DA notably leveraged the social networking
site more for intense focused messaging of its negative campaign against the
ANC while simultaneously promoting positive electoral messages around
its own core issues and metro (urban) mayoral candidates. Furthermore,
battleground metros were identified, narrow-cast and subsequently audience segmented by the party in Ekurhuleni, Johannesburg, Tshwane (in Gauteng)
and Nelson Mandela Bay (in the Eastern Cape). This led to an emphasised
campaign to either activate the party’s own urban support base and/or to
suppress the ANC’s turnout in these highly-contested areas. The results of
this study further indicate that the ANC and DA both used Twitter to claim
explicit and implicit digital party-political issue ownership in the 2016 LGE.
The Impact of Cross-Boundary Electoral Demarcation Disputes in South Africa after 1994: The Case Study of Moutse
The article investigates the impact of cross-boundary electoral demarcation
disputes between the Mpumalanga and Limpopo provinces after 1994. The
article further examines how the electoral demarcation disputes can be
resolved by negotiating with the dissatisfied communities. Moutse is located
within a community that straddles north-western Mpumalanga and southern
Limpopo provinces in South Africa. In 2005 the community members of
Moutse wards 5 and 6 were dissatisfied by the decision of the South African
national government, Limpopo and Mpumalanga provincial governments for
relocating them under a newly demarcated administrative boundary without
hearing the views of the community. The article used community dialogues
for its research. This approach is explained predominantly by qualitative
and quantitative approaches to indicate processes of data collection, to
explain the nature of the problem and explore the findings of communitybased research. The study reveals that violent disruptions and protests by
community members can be avoided if community voices are taken into
consideration. The article recommends that state institutions that support
constitutional democracy need to show the administrative and political
will to transform electoral demarcation challenges and implement effective
democratic principles. In conclusion, advanced institutional planning and
its transparent application must be emphasised.