Youth at risk of alienation from electoral system, report finds

There is a growing disillusionment in democracy and lower voter enthusiasm is threatening a permanent separation of the youth from the electoral system.

These findings were part of a Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) report delivered on Tuesday at an IEC seminar exploring electoral trends in the country — and more specifically the Eastern Cape.

 HSRC’s South African Social Attitudes Survey (Sasas) director Benjamin Roberts said if the youth did not take part in the democratic process undergirded by the sense of civic duty, they may never see voting as a viable vehicle of political engagement.

“The youth are starting to disengage from politics through the ballot box and have not yet had their first electoral experience,”   Roberts said.

“We have a culture of voting in SA and have been to the ballot box before — there is a general trend for people to come out in the end.

“But in the absence of having your first electoral experience, that culture cannot take root among younger voters,” he said.

The growing trend of disillusionment to head to the polls comes as the popularity of democracy has been on the decline both nationally and internationally in the past 10 years.

Washington-based non-profit organisation Freedom House Group, which researches freedom around the world, has recently affirmed 17 years of decline in the global level of democratic norms and institutions.

In the Eastern Cape, the HSRC found that trust in political institutions is the lowest it has ever been since the council started the survey in 2003.

Trust in the National Assembly had declined to just more than 40% in 2021 from its peak of 82% in 2004.

Confidence in local government was at 30% when last polled.

“The last local government elections were taken among the harshest moods we have seen in the country since 1994.

“The Eastern Cape is no exception to this trend, though we have seen in certain instances it does fare better than other provinces, most notably KwaZulu-Natal, where the voting age public has become very negative very quickly, but generally the mood in the Eastern Cape has also worsened over time,”   Roberts said.

The HSRC found that while there are still high levels of voter registration — with the Eastern Cape having the highest number of registered voters per voting age — voter turnout is expected to decrease as more people take a grim view of the gains of democracy such as improvement in living standards.

“Apart from general views on the democratic performance in the country, we also see signs that electoral attitudes are beginning to change along with democratic evaluation.

“The 2021 figure on people’s attitude towards their civic duty to vote is the lowest seen in the province to date.

“A civic duty to vote is one of the core attitudinal predispositions among the voting-age public that helps promote turnout; if that begins to diminish we can expect a lower turnout in the next election,”   Roberts said.

The report by the HSRC was discussed and debated in a forum including representatives from the House of Traditional Leaders and academics from Eastern Cape universities such as Nelson Mandela University, Rhodes University and Fort Hare University.

While political analyst Ongama Mtimka said the report positively showed that there were still high levels of political tolerance in the province, the decline in the civic duty to vote posed a great risk to the political system.

“As people begin to lose hope in formal political processes, you can only guess where they go to get the recourse they should be getting through these processes,”   Mtika said.

“There are spaces in a democracy where participation is invited — once people are not valuing those processes it poses a greater risk to the system on what  the outlet is for their political expression and grievances,” he said.

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