Do Not Just Look At The Institutions

Institutions do not run themselves. They are run by human beings with agency, who possess their own ideas and interests.

Photo by Bovia & Co. Photography on Unsplash

Before Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in the 1930s and the subsequent Holocaust of Jews by the Nazis, the dominant approach in the discipline of political science was institutionalism.

While institutionalism has been defined in a number of ways and contains certain complexities, it broadly holds that the politics of a particular jurisdiction can be understood primarily by analysing the formal political institutions that its constitution establishes.

These institutions, which include but are not limited to a legislature, judiciary, and executive, are assumed by institutionalists to be not only the primary explanatory factors for the direction of politics, but also primary determinants in producing stable, predictable, and desirable political outcomes.

One of institutionalism’s obvious limitations is that it fails to sufficiently appreciate that institutions do not run themselves. They are run by human beings with agency, who possess their own ideas and interests and can manipulate, circumvent, or otherwise alter the way in which these institutions operate. In doing so, they can alter the direction of politics and ultimately produce undesirable political outcomes.

This limitation largely explains why institutionalism was unable to anticipate Hitler’s internal subversion of the democratic institutions of the Weimar Republic and the subsequent persecution and extermination of Jews in the Holocaust. It also explains why institutionalism, particularly from the 1940s onwards, was increasingly displaced by behaviouralism, which has since become one of the dominant approaches in the discipline of political science.

While behaviouralism does not disregard institutions, it recognises that institutions alone cannot explain the direction of politics, and that the human beings who populate them are themselves agents in producing political outcomes. It therefore places greater emphasis on the ideas, interests, attitudes, and behaviour of those individuals in explaining political outcomes.

The South African case

Some South African journalists in the mainstream press establishment, as well as a handful of international observers, are not political scientists or conscious institutionalists. But their arguments and responses to the concerns of disfavoured communities in the wake of the diplomatic breakdown between Pretoria and Washington echo the logic of institutionalism.

Much like institutionalists, they have adopted an institutionally deterministic position that regards South Africa’s formal political institutions, such as its judiciary, as the primary lens through which its politics should be understood and as the primary determinants of its political trajectory.

And while there is some truth to their position, what they are inadvertently doing is obscuring the fact that the socialist ANC, guided by its lodestar, the National Democratic Revolution, has spent more than thirty years systematically compromising the country’s formal political institutions and instrumentalising them to advance a harmful policy agenda that has, and continues to produce undesirable political outcomes.

The formally federal Constitution of 1996, which was supposed to usher in a truly non-racial and federal political dispensation that protects the natural rights of all individuals - as jurist Dr Martin van Staden has argued - has instead become an instrument through which judges aligned with the ANC’s NDR have played a central role in writing race law into it.

The text of the Constitution itself recognises the principle of redress, but does not expressly prescribe any specific form of redress. These judges, influenced by the dominant ideology of Transformationism in legal discourse, which sees the Constitution as an instrument for restructuring society rather than primarily as a means of limiting state power, have been central to the emergence of a race-regulated regime in South Africa that infringes upon the natural rights of disfavoured communities.

It is no exaggeration to argue that the judiciary, which should be interpreting the Constitution as a mechanism for limiting state power, ensuring that its federal spirit is realised, protecting the natural rights of all individuals, and upholding equality before the law, has in large part been ideologically compromised and transformed into an institution through which race law is legitimised and developed.

The institutional blind spot

When some journalists in the mainstream press establishment and a handful of international observers rush to dismiss legitimate claims of racial persecution and contend that the judiciary remains a defender of the rights of all individuals, what they are overlooking is that the same judiciary is populated by judges whose jurisprudence has contributed to the infringement of the natural rights of disfavoured communities.

Such is the blind spot of institutionalism in South Africa.

To be clear, I am not demonising the judiciary.

Nor am I suggesting that the country is somehow identical to the Weimar Republic under Hitler and the Nazis.

Nor am I arguing that institutions are useless or serve no purpose. As a liberal, I value institutions and recognise that they can serve as important checks on state power.

But an important lesson in political science that transcends jurisdictional boundaries is that institutions alone cannot serve as the lens through which political outcomes are understood, nor can they be assumed to be the primary determinants of those outcomes. The people who populate them, the ideas they hold, and their interests matter.

And when the US Ambassador to South Africa, Brent Bozell III, expressed disbelief at how Kill the Boer could constitute free speech in a civilised society, he was, perhaps without identifying or unpacking it, pointing to precisely the blind spot that has been identified in this piece.

Ayanda Sakhile Zulu holds a BSocSci in Political Studies from the University of Pretoria and is a Policy Officer at the Free Market Foundation.