Perceptions of the future of South Africa: a 2009 replication

Abstract

Karl Mannheim argued that in times of social upheaval and instability, individuals would engender ‘situationally transcendent ideas’, or ideologies, about the future of their society. In South Africa, Kurt Danziger initiated a tradition of research on future ideologies in 1956. Danziger’s research was replicated in three studies, which were conducted during, and shortly after, the era of apartheid. The African National Congress’s Polokwane Conference of 2007 and the subsequent 2009 elections threatened to reconfigure the South African political landscape which had reached a plateau of stability since the abolition of Apartheid. This political vicissitude presented the opportunity to conduct a further study on South Africans’ future ideologies. Following the methodology used in previous studies, 223 University of the Witwatersrand students wrote brief essays on the history of South Africa projected into the future. In addition, they completed an optimism scale and a relative deprivation scale. The future ideologies that emerged from the essays were Liberalism, Deterioration, and Catastrophe. Contrary to previous studies, no race differences were found in the frequencies of these ideologies. Analysis of variance tests revealed significant differences in participants’ degree of optimism to the future and certain measures of relative deprivation for those whose essays expressed Liberal, Deterioration, and Catastrophic future ideologies.