This question is frequently asked in new democracies in general, and South Africa's in particular. Comparing the country to others, particularly in North America and Western Europe, is a national pastime. Whether the country is a ‘real’ democracy is a theme in the public debate. It has also been asked, repeatedly, by Western scholars of democracy anxious to discover whether the democratic systems which have spread to Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe are likely to last and are ‘the real thing’, not a cheap ‘Third World’ imitation. They ask the question through a framework, the ‘consolidation’ paradigm, which has influenced the thinking of most South African scholars of democracy as well as many elsewhere in Africa. It also, almost unnoticed, has shaped the way non-academic participants in the public debate think of democracy and its challenges. Since the paradigm shapes South African and African attitudes to democracy, what is it and how useful is it as a tool?

For a while, as many more societies adopted democratic rule, the test of whether a country was ‘really’ democratic seemed, to some mainstream scholars and practitioners, simple. Countries were democratic if they held regular elections in which political parties freely established by citizens were allowed to compete. Later, the writings of more than a few scholars – and the concrete experiences of citizens – began to recognise that societies are not democratic simply because they hold multi-party elections. The ‘fallacy of electoralism’ noted in the introduction – the idea that a country has ‘become democratic’ simply because it holds competitive elections – has been largely discredited in the academic literature which sought to understand and explain the spread of formal democracy across the globe. The limits of an ‘electoral democracy’ which offers the vote but not the freedoms and the right to choose which must accompany it are now widely acknowledged, particularly since elections propelled leaders with little regard for democratic rules to power in the United States and Eastern Europe as well as parts of the global South.