South Africa is routinely characterised as a ‘party dominant’ polity because the governing African National Congress has won every national election since democracy was achieved in 1994. This article challenges this understanding. The system, it argues, is not one in which a single party uses its electoral majority to impose its will on society. It is better understood as one in which ‘archipelagos of domination’—which exist in a polity when more than one social group and more than one party achieve political and social domination of geographically distinct areas—shapes politics and determines who wields power. This is a consequence both of the society’s identity divisions and of the reality, often ignored by theories of ‘party dominance’, that social power—the capacity of actors in society to wield power through control of intellectual and material resources—can achieve what party dominance is said to achieve: a virtual monopoly on setting the agenda. It argues also that current literature on subnational dominance, while it offers valuable insights, ignores the role of social power and is thus unable to explain societies which have been shaped to varying degrees by the domination of one race over another.
