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African Affairs 97:251-264 (1998)
© The Royal African Society
CONSOLIDATING SOUTH AFRICAN DEMOCRACY: THE POLITICAL ARITHMETIC OF BUDGETARY REDISTRIBUTION
The author is in the Department of Economics, University of Stellenbosch South Africa
An absence of legitimacy of an economic dispensation cannot be overcome by democratization alone. In unequal societies, new regimes also seek to increase economic legitimacy and therefore their own political legitimacy through redistribution. Social spending is the most promising redistributive device available to South Africa's new democracy to reduce racial inequalities, but there are constraints on increasing social spending or even redistributing existing spending. To maximize political impact, spending will thus probably be concentrated on the most visible programmes and concentrated in die cities. The impact on black material living standards of complete redistribution of social spending is shown to be fairly large, but still may not satisfy the newly enfranchised. Coloureds, Indians and poorer whites would lose most from budgetary redistribution. As demands exceed resources, resource allocation then becomes a question of political arithmetic. This may assist in consolidating democracy amongst urban black ‘insiders’, but would effectively leave the unorganized rural poor fiscally disenfranchised.