South African political parties in a word [or three]
Have you been wondering exactly what our South African political parties standing on important issues is? I sure have, and if you’re anything like me, you would like to see them publicly confirming [and even debating] those matters, rather than the pointless waffle and prepared speeches we’re subjected to.
Summary of party policies
Recently, News24 put together a useful summary of some of the major parties manifestos: “The A-Z of party policies”. These go a way to helping so be sure to have a look at them.
Party policies – the most important points
To get a better idea of what’s important to them, I decided to try something different using an online tool called “Wordle”, which analyses blocks of text and indicates what the most important words used are using size relativity.
Putting the News24 summaries and Wordle together produced the following “clouds”. [I've also put a quick sentence made up of the words that stand out to me from the analysis - ie what I would think their most important issues are, with a little bit of creative licence exercised]:
[click the images for a larger view]
African National Congress – ANC
ANC wants decent housing development programme, economic system, crime
Congress of the people – COPE
COPE pledges land, health, also ensure youth communities improve
Democratic Alliance – DA
DA ensure land, health, support public private development programme
What does it mean?
While there are definitely similarities, some of the most important points are clearly differentiated:
- Of the three parties, crime and housing are most prominent in the ANC’s agenda
- COPE and the DA both have land and health as important issues
- COPE’s focus appears strongly leaning towards youth and communities
- The DA appears to favour public/private development more than the other parties here
Of course, there are two inherent problems in the above analyses or “clouds”:
- The clouds do not differentiate context, meaning it is impossible to tell whether the terms are used positively or negatively from this. However, since these are based on their manifestos we should safely be able to assume they are used in accordance with generally accepted connotations.
- The clouds are based on summaries prepared by a third party [in this case, News24] from information they were able to identify, meaning it may not be complete or fully reflective of the parties intentions.
Either way, it’s an interesting exercise and does provide both good insight into what important issues should be, and hopefully a slightly different view of what we should be hearing from them.
I’ve just included three of the largest parties above. You can find clouds of the other parties that News24 analysed here. [hints on their "biggest" issues: UDM - land ; IFP - must!; ID - must!; FF+ - education; ACDP - land]
Please also see this earlier post for a look at the words of Jacob Zuma, the presidency and the NPA
Photo: “In the voting booth” by rebamex, via flickr
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