‘Thin’ loyalty and declining attachment to the African National Congress
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The African National Congress (ANC) has been an electorally dominant party in South African politics since 1994, with its vote share peaking in 2004 before falling to a low in the most recent 2019 general elections. Simultaneously, there have been much sharper declines in levels of ANC partisanship and assessments of government performance among the party’s own voters. This presents a puzzle: Why do a significant share of ANC voters continue to support a party that they do not ‘feel close’ to and do not believe is adequately managing the economy or the delivery of public goods? Based upon original qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with 111 intended ANC voters, I argue that there is a sizeable portion of ANC voters whose connection to the party is characterised by a conditional loyalty that falls short of a more thoroughgoing partisanship. The persistence of ‘thin’ loyalty alongside habitual and strategic voting for the ANC – especially among the ‘born free’ generation – has obfuscated the extent of decline in the perceived efficacy of voting and overall satisfaction with the outcomes of democratic politics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".