South Africans no longer trust the police, parliament or political parties - what that means

Key topics:Declining trust in South African police, parliament, and political parties.Corruption and poor governance erode political legitimacy and rule of law.Gender differences observed in attitudes toward obeying or bypassing laws..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Amanda Gouws* and Joseph Ayodele Kupolusi*.For democracies to function well, citizens have to trust their institutions. Every incidence of bad service delivery or corruption will influence how much citizens trust institutions.The latest incident that will most likely shake confidence in South Africa’s political system, and specifically the police and the criminal justice system, is the accusation by General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, provincial commissioner of KwaZulu-Natal province, that members of these institutions are involved in organised crime. The accusations are being investigated by the Madlanga Commission and heard in parliament by an ad hoc committee.General Mkhwanazi alleged that the police minister, other members of the South African Police Force and members of the judiciary interfered with the investigation he was leading into political assassinations. He alleged they attempted to close down the “political killings task team” because of their own links to organised crime.Signs of corruption have, over time, eroded political trust among citizens in South Africa.In this article we discuss the findings of the most recent survey by Afrobarometer, a pan-African research network, and two attitude surveys done by Citizen Surveys for the South African Research Chairs Initiative chair in Gender Politics. The data of the SARChI Chair will be made public once the research project is concluded.Prof Gouws specialises in the construction of surveys and analysis of survey data and Dr Kupolusi is a statistician who is her post-doctoral fellow and did the statistical analysis for this article.The reports show a decline of trust over a four-year period. The 2022 Afrobarometer data supports the findings of our two attitude surveys.Citizens have to trust a political system if they are to accept its legitimacy and support it. When they see the system as legitimate, citizens are more willing to obey the laws of the country. They then support the rule of law..Political trust and legitimacy.We understand “political trust” as it was conceptualised by David Easton, an American political scientist, in 1975. It is the perceived likelihood that the political system will deliver public goods without having to be closely scrutinised by citizens. Political trust is closely linked to the concepts of political support and legitimacy.These three concepts relate to each other in the following way. Support for the political authorities or a regime will typically express itself in two forms: trust or confidence in them, and belief in their legitimacy.Trust is present when citizens feel that their own interests would be attended to even if the authorities were exposed to little supervision or scrutiny. Legitimacy is present when people believe it is right and proper to accept and obey the authorities, and abide by the requirements of the political system.Trust and legitimacy are therefore distinct concepts. Trust is measured through political support for the regime and its authorities. Easton distinguishes between two types of support.Diffuse support is a reservoir of positive attitudes and goodwill towards the regime as a whole, its underlying principles, and the larger political community. Diffuse support is more durable than specific support, which is trust in the incumbents of the political system.Research has shown that levels of trust in institutions like parliament, parties and courts far outweigh judgements on national and personal economic well-being. Economic performance is more important in high income countries, but trust in institutions, coupled with free and fair elections, is more important in newer democracies..Declining levels of trust.In this article, through the use of different surveys conducted at different points in time (2018 and two different surveys in 2022), we show how institutional trust has declined over time in South Africa, to the detriment of the political system.We also show that there’s a gender gap – that men and women differ in their attitudes towards the rule of law.The most recent Afrobarometer survey (Round 9, 2022) had a national sample of 1,582 respondents. It found “no trust” at 66% for the police, 73% for parliament, 75% for the ruling party and 72% for opposition parties. It is only for the courts where “no trust” is below 50%.Afrobarometer’s findings corroborate those of our own surveys, done in 2018 and 2022 by Citizen Surveys, a survey company in Cape Town. The survey was conducted with a national stratified sample of 1,300 respondents in all nine provinces and translated into seven languages. The interviews were done face to face by the fieldworkers of Citizen Surveys.What our surveys show are declining levels of trust over time in the most important institutions of the police, parliament and political parties, with “no trust” in all of them over 50%..When it comes to the rule of law our 2022 data showed that 45.8% of respondents said it was “not necessary to obey the laws of a corrupt government”, 69% indicated that it was fine to “get around the law as long as you don’t break it”, 62% agreed that it was fine if “the law is suspended in times of emergency” and 50.4% thought it was “better to ignore the law and solve problems immediately than wait for a legal solution” (vigilante justice).What surprised us was the difference between the attitudes of men and women for the rule of law in our 2022 data. For “it is not necessary to obey the laws of a corrupt government” 44% of men agreed vs 47% of women. For “it is all right to get around the law as long as you don’t actually break it” 65.6% of men agreed vs 71.4% of women. For “suspending the law in times of emergency” 61.2% of men agreed vs 63.5% of women. And for “sometimes it is better to ignore the law and solve problems immediately” 46.2% of men vs 53.4% of women agreed.What this shows is that women are more militant in their attitudes towards (breaking) the rule of law – findings that were quite unexpected. It seems that women, who are often at the receiving end of crime, have had enough..What needs to happen.Declining trust and support for the rule of law undermines the legitimacy of government. The courts have been a beacon of legitimacy but even for courts the level of “no trust” is close to 50%.A serious problem is that citizens do not distinguish between institutions (diffuse support) and incumbents (specific support). This means that corrupt officials undermine trust in institutions (such as the police, parliament and political parties).A decline in specific support affects diffuse support – that reservoir of goodwill toward institutions. When corruption is not dealt with, erosion of trust in institutions is a consequence of the behaviour of incumbents.Political trust and support for the rule of law are important in democracies to sustain stability, and so that citizens will not start to look for alternative ways such as protest or political violence to make their demands known to those who govern them..*Amanda Gouws: Professor of Political Science and Chair of the South African Research Initiative in Gender Politics, Stellenbosch University*Joseph Ayodele Kupolusi: Senior Lecturer, Department of Statistics, Federal University of Technology, Akure.This article was originally published by The Conversation and has been republished with permission.

South Africans no longer trust the police, parliament or political parties - what that means

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