Its prime weakness is that in providing exclusively for the representation of parties, it focusses all incentives upwards to party mandarins, rather than to the voters; hence the demand for reforms that to reverse this. Since the 1990s, the remedy for this has been presumed to be a constituency-based system. In 2020, a ruling by the Constitutional Court found that ‘that the Electoral Act 73 of 1998 is unconstitutional to the extent that it requires that adult citizens may be elected to the National Assembly and Provincial Legislatures only through their membership of political parties.’
