South Africa's first ever non-racial and multi-party election was one of the key global events of 1994. From the ashes of a repressive, segregated and racist state emerged - miraculously and relatively free of bloodshed - a multiracial and potentially compassionate new nation, led by one of the political icons of the late-20th-century, Nelson Mandela. In the year before the April 1994 election R.W. Johnson and Lawrence Schlemmer assembled a team of leading South African social scientists and political analysts to monitor the coming poll and its aftermath. The study was based at the non-partisan Institute for Multi-Party Democracy and the Human Sciences Research Council and a large network of observers of all political persuasions and many walks of life was put in place. The team monitored the campaign, party organization, the media and voter education efforts throughout the crucial and populous areas of the Western Cape, Natal and the Reef. The information generated was made available as a public information service to the media election monitors, voter educators and to all political parties equally and without charge. The team was invited to brief international observers from the UN, the OAU, the Commonwealth and the European Union. Using the resulting information base, this text looks at the course and context of the election, the results, the new constitution, party affiliation and loyalty, and the construction of policy consensus in the new South Africa. As a source of information and work of analysis, it represents a detailed account of the election and the polity that emerged from it.
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Jeffrey Herbst (1996) studied this question.