Political Science and the End of Apartheid

Abstract

Comparative political studies have contributed little to political actors’ understandings of the causes of ‘democratization’ in Africa, and still less to their ability to assess and improve the prospects of continued and deepened democratic rule. Democratic transition and consolidation analysis, however, has not represented the entirety of efforts by political scientists in modern South Africa. In the next two chapters I examine four other areas in which political analysts have made major contributions. First, and in this chapter, I explore how they have constructed narratives of political change, attempting to turn bewildering events into a coherent sequence of causes and effects which seem intuitively and logically to follow one from the other. Such narratives have been a key source for journalists and politicians alike, but have also been used as elements of the detailed transition analysis that has increasingly displaced general models of democratzation.