Would citizens participate in elections if they see no benefit for themselves? Speakers Dr Ben Roberts of the Human Sciences Research Council and Dr Pali Lehohla inspired this question at the thought leadership seminar titled The Disappearing Labour Theory: Understanding Recent Voting Patterns in South Africaâs Elections. The seminar, hosted by the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC), was aimed at trying to understand why citizens do not participate in elections.

In my closing remarks (below), I responded to the speakers intuitively as an adjudicator. I emphasised the co-responsibility of citizens and adjudicators for participating in making decisions necessary for the peaceful ordering of society. Then I described the lack of parity of participation between adjudicators and citizens, among citizens, and between citizens and elected representatives. I concluded, as the speakers did, that social injustices account not for voter apathy or disinterest, but disaffection with elections.

Peaceful social ordering

Voters, like adjudicators â judges, magistrates and arbitrators â make choices in different contexts, to reach decisions cumulatively necessary for the common purpose of peacefully ordering society. Otherwise, conflict and chaos would be the order of the day. At least, in a rights-based constitutional democracy with an economy based on capitalism and politics founded on nationalism.

Once adjudicators are seized with a case, they must issue a reasoned decision â unless they recuse themselves, and then too, only for good cause. However, adult citizens are neither compelled to register to vote, nor to vote.

Adjudicatorsâ irrational decisions can be reviewed, appealed against and set aside. Adjudicators may also be disciplined if the degree of irrationality amounts to incompetence or misconduct. How citizens participate is an individualâs choice. A citizen who drops off to sleep during a campaign speech will not suffer punishment as would an adjudicator who dozes during counselâs argument. Voters may toss a coin to choose a candidate, but adjudicators may not declare a person guilty or not guilty by tossing a coin.

Elections are intensely passionate and partisan. Unlike adjudicators, citizens do not have to be dispassionate, independent and impartial when they make choices about elections. They are unaccountable for their decisions to vote or not, and for whom they vote. Ballots are secret.

Even where funding is concerned, citizens who participate in elections as political parties and candidates may solicit political funding within certain limits. However, an adjudicator who solicits funding, other than fees for adjudication, would be disqualified and sanctioned for taking a bribe.

Ramifications

Unlike adjudicators, who are sanctioned as individuals, punishment of citizens for their choices is collective. Citizens must suffer elected representatives who fail to deliver an orderly, constitutionally compliant society. Herein lies the phenomenal burden of co-responsibility on citizens, the weight of which is not fully realised.

Except for precedent-setting decisions, most of the decisions of adjudicators seldom ramify beyond the parties to a dispute. Collectively, adjudicated decisions incrementally collate over time into a tapestry that ultimately contributes to shaping an orderly society.

Contrastingly, every single decision â and non-decision â of citizens strikes directly and almost instantly on the orderliness or otherwise of the emerging society. Paradoxically, their actions and inaction may also impair the quality of adjudication in the new society, if the newly elected political representatives contaminate the independence, impartiality and integrity of adjudicators.

Recognising these differences between adjudicators and citizens and reviewing their respective weight of co-responsibility for social ordering, ought to trigger our concern for the choices citizens make.

**Parity of participation **

Although there is parity of purpose for decision making, there is no parity of participation between adjudication and voting. Adjudicators bear a heavier burden when citizensâ participation in elections plummets.

Disparate participation distorts both the balance and separation of powers between adjudication and voting. As citizens relinquish their agency as co-designers of a peaceful social order, adjudicators must then fill the gaps. Adjudicators are saddled with disputes unsuitable for adjudication. Disputes of interests, such as budgeting, are best determined by citizens. Adjudication is designed for resolving disputes of rights. The misfit of disputes to process shores up in a weakening social order.

We ought to be relieved that adjudication thrives. Escalating disaffection could ripen conditions for more forceful and even violent contestation.

Common purpose and reciprocity

Proliferating litigation about electoral disputes shows that citizens are failing to find common purpose and reciprocity among themselves. Without âorganisation by common aims and organisation by reciprocity⦠nothing resembling a society can existâ, said Lon Fuller in his posthumously published article, The Forms and Limits of Adjudication.

The burgeoning of more than 550 registered political parties is double the number of companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. Is this evidence of a vibrant democracy, or a splintering society? Some political parties commoditise votes, announcing that âtheyâre in it to win itâ, to be âkingmakersâ.

Political funding pipers call the tunes for elected representatives to play. Once elected, many representatives quickly evolve into an elite entitled class, budgeting in favour of blue lights for themselves, instead of bread for those who voted for them.

Parity of participation

Nancy Fraser coined the term parity of participation as a principle of social justice. It embraces the idea that social, economic and political structures must enable everyone to interact with one another for a just society, as equally enabled and empowered peers, regardless of (dis)ability, ethnicity, gender, sexuality or social background. She advances three pillars of participation:

• Equal distribution of material resources.
• Recognition of status.
• Political voice and representation.

Cumulatively, and dialectically, all three pillars must co-exist to constitute a caring, socially just society. Without social justice, parity of participation between adjudication and elections, and among citizens, is illusive.

**Social injustices **

Is there a link between social injustice and declining democracies? Democratic decline is not exclusively about failed and rigged elections or coups dâétat. Nor are the synonyms âdemocratic deficitâ or ârecessionâ abstractions. Rather, they breed in social injustices.

South Africaâs Gini coefficient, which is a measure of income inequality, is 63.0%, the highest in the world. Yet SA is not the poorest country. In its 2021 report, the Paris-based World Inequality Lab noted that our democratic government has failed to rid us of the legacy of apartheid and colonialism. It find no evidence that wealth inequality has decreased since the end of apartheid. The richest 1% of South Africans have probably increased their wealth post-apartheid, it says.

Unemployment is not the cause of inequality but rather a consequence of the unequal distribution of skills, exacerbated by the automating AI economy. During his 2015 visit to SA, Thomas Piketty argued that the top 10% of income earners accrue between 60-65% of income.

In the most economically unequal country in the entire world, can citizens share common purpose and reciprocity to build a developmental state, founded on constitutional rights for all?

Citizensâ choices

Under these conditions of heightening inequality and unemployment, democratic decline is driving citizens to a tipping point. Without equal distribution, without recognition as classes of marginalised citizens, would they:

• Exercise their political voice and representation?
• Be part of a collective continuing to strive for an orderly society?
• Look out for their own individual interests?
• Heed the statistics and progressively realise the constitutional project, as Dr Lehohla invites?
• Explore âthe relation between democracy and capitalism,â to âunderstand the system that perverts, constrains and limits [democracy],â as Fraser suggests?

Reflexively, citizens default to a cost-benefit analysis. If the benefits of participating in elections do not measure up to the costs, they would rather focus their energies and resources in safeguarding themselves and their families from a society that may be neither peaceful and orderly, nor caring and compassionate.

The most that the Electoral Commission of South Africa can do is urge adult citizens to register to vote, in the areas where they live, and to provide them with efficient electoral systems. Like taking horses to a waterhole, the commission cannot force citizens to register or to vote. Persuasion is the business of political parties and candidates.

They would have to convince citizens that the benefits exceed the costs. This would not mean buying their votes but reimagining and delivering an orderly, peaceful society. DM