Dissatisfied ANC voters were much more likely to switch their votes if they held positive views of an opposition party. However, the problem for the opposition is that few people held these views.
Democracy cannot survive without free media.
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Finding the right balance between media freedom and limits remains one of the greatest challenges modern democracies face.
Hundreds of Namibians protested against growing gender-based violence in October 2020. The Afrikaans wording on the placard says ‘We are tired’.
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The legitimacy of SWAPO, the former liberation movement that has governed since 1990, has been eroded amid growing corruption and a deepening economic crisis.
Ugandan protesters call for an end to President Yoweri Museveni’s despotic rule.
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Western perceptions of what’s happening in Tunisia differ sharply with Tunisia’s daily reality: the truth is that its political transformation is in trouble.
Botswana’s LGBTI community is celebrating the decriminalisation of gay sex.
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By placing less emphasis on public opinion, and questioning public morality as the basis of its decision, the latest High Court decision shows that times have indeed changed.
Successful popular protests like this one in Algeria are the exception not the rule.
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Zambia has gone from a country where people engaged freely in open political debate to one where most people now look over their shoulders to see who’s listening.
Protests in South Africa are about more than just service delivery of basic services such as water and electricity. They reflect a wider crisis about the failure to build a more equitable society.
The middle class concept in Africa has remained vague and limited to number crunching. The minimum threshold for entering it in monetary terms was critically vulnerable to a setback into poverty.
In Africa a study shows stark differences between perceptions of justice among the rich and poor.
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Deputy Director of the Afrobarometer & Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and MSU’s African Studies Center, Michigan State University
Chief Research Specialist in Democracy and Citizenship at the Human Science Research Council and a Research Fellow Centre for African Studies, University of the Free State
Senior lecturer in the Department of Political and Administrative Studies at the University of Malawi and Research Associate, Centre for Social Science Research, University of Cape Town