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Poverty, corruption and democracy: the role of ‘political society' in post-colonial South Africa

ABSTRACT The paper addresses the question of what accounts for South Africa's current deep political and economic crisis. The paper argues that most theories of development do not take into account the important role of what Partha Chatterjee describes as political society. In polities such as South Africa, political society encompasses the vast majority of voters who are marginal to the capitalist economy yet central to democratic politics. Democratically elected leaders provide resources to the electorate on the basis of a ‘politics of exception’ which benefits groups rather than individuals and is distributed unevenly. As a result, many of the assumptions about political and economic development in the global economy are undermined by local political conditions.