Political Culture and Democratic Governance in Southern Africa

The interface of political culture and democratic governance has not been thoroughly explored and problematised in the democracy debate in Southern Africa today. The current debate has tended to focus more on elections and electoral systems and, by default, leaving out culture in the discourse. This article is, thus, an attempt to bring political culture back in. This is extremely crucial for democratic practice and is also highly dependent upon a particular political culture prevailing in a given country or region. The main thrust of the paper is that a culture of political violence and instability in the region is explicable in terms of the structural make-up of the region's political economy (a la structuralist theorists) and not so much by the level of institutionalization of governance itself as some modernization (read institutional-functionalist) theorists would like us to believe. Although elections and electoral systems do, to some degree, have a bearing on stability or lack of it, political culture does play a role in regime legitimacy or lack thereof. Political violence and multivariate conflicts that have marked the region's political landscape and prompted by resource distribution, ideological contestation, social differentiation along class, gender, ethnic and racial cleavage, clearly have an enormous impact on the prospects for nurturing and consolidation of democratic governance in Southern Africa.