Quote of the week
Universal adult suffrage on a common voters roll is one of the foundational values of our entire constitutional order. The achievement of the franchise has historically been important both for the acquisition of the rights of full and effective citizenship by all South Africans regardless of race, and for the accomplishment of an all-embracing nationhood. The universality of the franchise is important not only for nationhood and democracy. The vote of each and every citizen is a badge of dignity and of personhood. Quite literally, it says that everybody counts. In a country of great disparities of wealth and power it declares that whoever we are, whether rich or poor, exalted or disgraced, we all belong to the same democratic South African nation; that our destinies are intertwined in a single interactive polity.
August and Another v Electoral Commission and Others (CCT8/99) [1999] ZACC 3
On elites and democracy
From a realistic perspective, the role of elites and their policies in the process of regime transformation are not so simple. Once it is recognized that all “real-existing democracies” (REDs) depend crucially on the role of representatives who act as intermediaries between the citizens and their rulers – some of whom, either directly in presidential regimes or indirectly in parliamentary ones, become the rulers – then, the difference between autocracy and democracy is bound to be less dramatic. Instead of rule by a few vs. rule by all, we have “rule by some politicians” or “polito-cracy” as the outcome. These newly empowered representatives inevitably form an elite institutionally separate from the electorate that has chosen them competitively or the electorate that has chosen them for their reputation
