The importance of elections cannot be doubted. 

At the very least, they provide the public with its clearest formal opportunity to influence the political process and also help, directly or indirectly, to determine who will hold government power. 

From this perspective, elections are about results – in other words, who wins and who loses. 

This view is encouraged by media coverage, which, with the aid of opinion polls, increasingly turns elections into horse races. Nevertheless, politicians are not backward in claiming that elections have a broader and more profound meaning. 

Elections are, in this sense, seen as nothing less than a visible manifestation of the public interest. In short, ‘the public has spoken’. 

We have seen this manifest in South Africa, where the GNU was introduced. 

Political commentators also express their opinions, proclaiming, for instance, that elections reflect a ‘shift in popular mood’. 

The problem, however, is that all such claims and interpretations have a strongly arbitrary character. Any attempt to invest an election with ‘meaning’ is fraught with dangers. The people may have spoken, but it is frustratingly difficult to know what they have said. Many of the problems stem from the difficult notion of the ‘public interest’. 

If such a thing as a ‘public’ interest exists, it surely reflects the common or collective interest of all citizens. 

This is precisely what Rousseau implied in the idea of the ‘general will’, which he understood to mean the will of the citizens, provided each of them acts selflessly. 

The difficulty with this view is obvious. 

Quite simply, individuals do not, in practice, act selflessly in accordance with a general or collective will. There is no such thing as an indivisible public interest. 

All generalisations about ‘the public’ or ‘the electorate’ must, therefore, be treated with grave suspicion. 

There is no electorate as such, only a collection of electors who each possess particular interests, sympathies, allegiances and so on. 

At best, election results reflect the preferences of the majority, or perhaps a plurality, of voters. 

However, even then, there are possibly insurmountable problems in deciding what these votes ‘mean’. 

Difficulty in interpreting election results lies in the perhaps impossible task of knowing why voters vote as they do. 

Voting is a very simple act, shaped by a complex of factors, such as unemployment, poverty, crime, health and education, including conscious and unconscious, rational and irrational, selfish and selfless. 

All theories are, therefore, partial and must be qualified by a range of other considerations. 

This can be seen in relation to the so-called ‘economic theory of democracy’ advanced by Anthony Dowus (1957). 

This theory suggests that voting reflects voters’ self-interest, with voters selecting parties much as consumers select goods or services. On this basis, the winning party in an election can reasonably claim that its policies most closely correspond to the interests of the largest group of voters. 

On the other hand, voters do not put the effort to familiarise themselves with the different party manifestos or political issues and are influenced by a range of irrational factors such as habit, social conditioning, the image of the parties and the personalities of their leaders. 

Moreover, the ability of parties to attract votes may have less to do with the ‘goods’ they put up for purchase than with the way those goods are ‘sold’ through advertising, political campaigning and propaganda. 

To the extent that this is true, election results may reflect not so much the interests of the mass of voters as the resources and finances available to the competing parties. 

In this light, perhaps the most significant function of elections is to set limits to arbitrary government by ensuring that politicians who claim to speak for the public must ultimately be judged by the public. 

*Reverend Jan A Scholtz is the former chairperson of the //Kharas Regional Council and former! Nami#nus constituency councillor. He holds a Diploma in Theology (B-Theo, SA), a Diploma in Youth Work and Development from the University of Zambia (UNZA) as well as a Diploma in Education III KOK) and a BA (HED) from UNISA.