Democracy in the US and South Africa: Two Elections in Comparative Context
In May 2024, South Africa went to elections in a plebiscite that saw the African National Congress (ANC) losing the absolute majority it had garnered since 1994. In November 2024, the United States goes to the polls in what will determine whether former President Donald Trump returns to the White House or Vice President Kamala Harris succeeds outgoing President Joe Biden.
There are distinct electoral politics differences between the two democracies. For instance, the U.S. elections are based on a direct presidential, gubernatorial, and senatorial voting system. South Africa, on the other hand, operates a proportional representation voting system where citizens vote for parties, and each party chooses its cabinet, parliamentary, and municipal representatives from party lists. Whereas South Africa is evolving into a multiparty democracy with tens of political parties gunning for political power, the U.S. has two dominant parties, the Democratic and Republican parties.
Yet, there are a couple of similarities between the two democracies. For instance, race and race relations are hot-button issues. Migration and migrant populations are equally contentious electoral issues, as are issues of economic inequalities, matters of social justice, unemployment, and variances in the economic wherewithal of various regions. Equally important is that the apex leadership in both countries determines the ebb and flow of the relations between them. In the recent past, geopolitical tensions have sparked contestations on the current and future nature of South Africa-US relations.
Jonathan Jansen (Stellenbosch University) will moderate the virtual discussion, where panelists from Stanford University and the University of the Witwatersrand will weigh in on these and more issues, fleshing out similarities and debating differences. By the time of the discussion, the president of the United States would have been declared. This will permit moving the analysis away from speculation and toward a measure of certainty on what to expect in the US-South Africa relations in the next four years.
This event is co-sponsored by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), the Center for African Studies (CAS), and the African Center for the Study of the United States, University of the Witwatersrand.
panelists
Larry Diamond
Larry Diamond is William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. His research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy, and U.S. and international policies to advance democracy and counter authoritarian influence. He was the founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy and he remains a consultant to the National Endowment for Democracy. Among his books is Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency.
Didi Kuo
Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. At Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), she oversees the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave - and Why They Don't (forthcoming, Oxford University Press) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the Rise of Programmatic Politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press 2018). She is a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and was a 2018 National Fellow at New America. She received a PhD from Harvard University, an MSc from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.
Bob Wekesa
Bob Wekesa is the Director of the African Centre for the Study of the United States at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), South Africa. He is the interim coordinator of the Africa-U.S. Universities Network. He teaches and supervises international media and communications projects focusing on Africa-China and Africa-United States topics. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Nairobi (1998) and master’s and doctoral degrees from the Communication University of China (2012 and 2015 respectively). He has published over the years across thought leadership, academic journal papers, chapters and books, and policy papers.
Thokozani Chilenga-Butao
Thokozani Chilenga-Butao is a lecturer in Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, where she also achieved her PhD. Her research interests are decentralization and federalism and their roles in state formation, governance, public administration, and public policy. She conducts empirical and applied research in a range of topics, including education, recentralization, and social grants such as the social relief of distress grant and the just energy transition. This involves research in some of South Africa’s largest government departments, including the Department of Basic Education, the National Treasury, and the former Department of Mineral Resources and Energy. In addition to teaching and research, Thokozani is an active member of university committees and research collaborations. She often comments on South African politics and the effects on governance, public administration, and public policy in local and international media.
Online via Zoom
Larry Diamond
CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C147
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At the Hoover Institution, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Project on the U.S., China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.
Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad. A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. His other books include: In Search of Democracy (2016), The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He has edited or coedited more than fifty books, including China’s Influence and American Interests (2019, with Orville Schell), Silicon Triangle: The United States, China, Taiwan the Global Semiconductor Security (2023, with James O. Ellis Jr. and Orville Schell), and The Troubling State of India’s Democracy (2024, with Sumit Ganguly and Dinsha Mistree).
During 2002–03, Diamond served as a consultant to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other organizations dealing with governance and development. During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, was one of the first books to critically analyze America's postwar engagement in Iraq.
Among Diamond’s other edited books are Democracy in Decline?; Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Arab World; Will China Democratize?; and Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, all edited with Marc F. Plattner; and Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran, with Abbas Milani. With Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, he edited the series, Democracy in Developing Countries, which helped to shape a new generation of comparative study of democratic development.
Download full-resolution headshot; photo credit: Rod Searcey.
Didi Kuo
Encina Hall, C150
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305
Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.
