[This is an excerpt from an article in The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs and Policy Studies. Opinions expressed do not reflect the opinion of the editorial board.]

South Africa’s party system is undergoing a profound transformation. In the 2024 elections, the ANC experienced its most decisive electoral loss since coming to power in 1994. Its share of the national vote declined from 58% to 40%, forcing it into a national coalition arrangement with numerous other parties for the first time. (The coalition currently comprises 11 parties.) This marks a shift from a dominant-party system to a more competitive, albeit fragmented, and volatile, multi-party environment.

One driver of this fragmentation is the absence of a formal electoral threshold. Although the implicit threshold to secure a seat in the National Assembly is approximately 0.19%, this low barrier has allowed for a proliferation of political parties. In 2009, 26 parties contested the national elections; by 2024, this number had risen to 52. The Electoral Commission currently recognises 383 registered parties, and the National Assembly now includes 18 parties – ten of which hold three seats or fewer.

As the party system faces an uncertain future involving coalitions, smaller parties will play a disproportionate role as kingmakers. This comes with costs and consequences for representation, law-making and voters.

While more parties may appear to offer voters more choice, it can paradoxically contribute to declining participation. Research suggests that excessive party proliferation raises the cognitive burden on voters and diminishes their confidence in the system’s ability to produce decisive outcomes, with both reducing the incentive to cast a vote.

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Moreover, coalition governments may afford disproportionate influence to smaller, often ideologically extreme or single-issue parties. This phenomenon is already evident in countries such as Israel, and its implications for effective governance and policy stability in South Africa are concerning.

Small parties also pose challenges for parliamentary functioning. With limited capacity, these parties often struggle to contribute meaningfully to legislative committees, resulting in narrowly focused or overly partisan engagement.

The South African electoral reform process will need to navigate these complex trade-offs. The central question must be: what specific problems is reform seeking to solve? The normative values of representivity and inclusivity – so central to the post-apartheid transition – must be weighed against newer imperatives, such as accountability, government responsiveness and democratic consolidation.

Maintaining an element of PR is vital for ensuring that the electoral system continues to reflect South Africa’s pluralistic society. However, reforms must now also aim to mitigate fragmentation, generate stable coalitions, and restore public confidence in democratic institutions. Two institutional design mechanism deserve serious consideration: first, the introduction of a formal electoral threshold of at least 2% of the national vote to secure representation; and second, a significant increase in the number of signatures required for new parties to gain access to the ballot (currently set at a modest 15% quota of previous seat allocation).

More ambitiously, reforms must confront the need to reintroduce political accountability into the electoral system. This could entail incorporating constituency-based elements to establish a direct link between voters and representatives. However, such a shift warrants careful scrutiny. While direct accountability is a central strength of constituency systems by incentivising representatives to be more responsive to public opinion it is not a panacea. Internal party dynamics, political culture and institutional norms also shape representatives’ behaviour. In the United States, for instance, partisan loyalty among legislators currently appears to hinder oversight over the executive, despite a constituency system.

Constituency-based reforms in South Africa must also be sensitive to historical and spatial dynamics. Poorly drawn boundaries risk entrenching apartheid-era geographic inequalities or favouring dominant parties at the expense of emerging voices. Newly demarcated districts must also ensure that apartheid’s spatial legacy is not reproduced in a manner that reflects the racial and political divisions of the past.

In sum, electoral reform must reflect both the enduring values of South Africa’s democratic transition and the changing realities of its political landscape. While the simplicity and inclusivity of pure PR have served the country well, the time has come to explore a more hybrid, and possibly more complex model—one that retains proportionality but introduces greater accountability, incentivises party consolidation, and strengthens democratic oversight.

The stakes are high. With public trust and voter participation at historic lows, electoral reform is no longer a question of administrative efficiency – it is essential to the renewal of South African democracy.

Collette Schulz-Herzenberg is with the Department of Political Science, Stellenbosch University.