The importance of elections cannot be doubted or over-emphasised. 

At the very least, they provide the public with its clearest formal opportunity to influence the political process and 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 horseraces. 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 our neighbouring South Africa, introducing the government of national unity (GNU). 

Political commentators also express their opinions, proclaiming, for instance, that elections reflect a ‘shift in the 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 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 a majority, or perhaps a plurality of voters. 

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

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

Voting, on the surface a very simple act, is shaped by complex factors such as unemployment, poverty, crime, health and education, including conscious and unconscious, rational and irretimal, 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.

This theory suggests that the act of voting reflects an expression of self-interest on the part of voters, who select parties in much the same way as consumers select goods or services for purchase. 

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 in 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, propaganda and so on.

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

 Thus, election results cannot speak for themselves, and politicians and political commentators who claim to find meaning in them are, to some extent, acting arbitrarily. Nevertheless, the latitude that this allows politicians is not unlimited because they know that they will be called to account at the next election. 

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.