Black-and-white picture of a political system: Post- apartheid South Africa

This article analyzes the cultural and political changes that occurred in South Africa after the fall of the Apartheid regime in 1994. Such relevant events have impacted South African political system; it is defined by Almond and Verba as the interaction of rôles (differentiated and undifferentiated) and the political culture (heterogeneous and homogeneous) in a country. A change in one of the two components is likely to trigger a change in the other, as well as a shift of the system in the four-fold Almond’s classification. The descriptive statistics and comparative document analysis employed to analyze data from 1982 and 2013 highlighted changes in both the political culture and the structure of rôles’ interactions, as well as a consequent shift of the political system from a Preindustrialized/Totalitarian to a Continental European one.


INTRODUCTION
After 46 years of segregation regime and 4 years of hard and at times stagnant negotiations (Byrnes, 1996b), in 1994 South Africa experienced its first free elections. This event was a milestone in the social and political history of South Africa: As the lawful racial segregation ceased, portions of population came to enjoy the right to vote for the very first time, participating in the shaping of the new political system that emerged with the election of Nelson Mandela as President. This is a clear manifestation of what Almond called "a political culture of participation" (Almond et al., 2008a: 2-3), being political culture broadly defined as people"s cognition, values and affective commitments towards the polity, policies and politics (Almond, 2000: 9).
It is clear that such a cry for change came from an urgent, pressuring and feeling of inappropriateness of the political system with regards to the political culture. However, the great socio-political change came with costs: Violent and rageous riots were held in Soweto and other South African townships, with many casualties on both sides. Such a pivotal event in the history of a country and its people is likely to affect not only the future political structure, but also how citizens see the political system and relate themselves to itnamely, the political culture itself (Almond et al., 2008a, b). Moreover, after Mandela"s election, a process of Constitutional reform was undertaken, resulting in South Africa"s 1996 Constitution. It ushered in a democratic regime that E-mail: serena.rosadini1@gmail.com.
Author(s) agree that this article remain permanently open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International License brought new freedoms and rights and greatly expanded for political participation (Byrnes, 1996b).
South African political culture and structure changed drastically during the 1990s (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, 1987). These two aspects are the two fundamental components of a political system as analyzed by Almond in 1956. Almond"s fourfold classification of political systems is built upon the binary nature of these two dimensions (Almond, 1956). A change in one of the two would therefore make the respective political system shift, or relocate into another class. In the specific, South Africa went through a process of change of not one, but both the dimensions of the classification. Did the political system shift as well according to Almond"s classification? While this step is of uttermost importance and well stressed in Almond (1956Almond ( , 1965Almond ( , 2000 work, most of his studies focus on modernized and industrialized countries, with variation on Asian or communist countries (ibid.). The only African exception is made for Nigeria, included in his famous masterpiece study of political attitudes and democracy in five nations Verba, 1963, ed. 1989). The African continent, center of the third wave of democratization (Huntington, 1991) for the dramatic political processes of decolonization and political transformation in the last decade of the XIX century, has been left underexplored. This article aims at testing whether the constitutional and social pivotal changes led to a shift of the South African political system. To pursue this aim, a mixed design of quantitative and qualitative methods was used in order to analyze the two aspectspolitical culture and political structurein pre-and post-1994 South Africa. In fact, while the literature agrees that political cultures indeed change (Almond, 1956(Almond, , 2000Almond et al., 2008a, b;Silver and Dowley, 2000;Ross, 2000;Pateman, 1971), it is also agreed that norms typically change slowly and reflect stable values. Political cultures are sustained or changed as people acquire their attitudes and values (Almond et al., 2008a). Therefore, the variation of South African political culture homogeneity is measured by analyzing two dataset of the World Values Survey, the "first wave" (1982) and the "sixth wave" (2013). By comparing these two moments in time, the differences (if any) will be captured between the political culture of two generations of South African, what Mattes defined the "Grand Apartheid Generation" and the "Born Frees" (Mattes, 2012: 137-140). With regard to the analysis of the change in the political structure, the study will compare the two Constitutions of 1983known as the Tricameral Constitution, or ACT 10-and of 1996, drafted during Mandela"s early office by the Constitutional Assembly, consisting of the combined Senate and National Assembly (Byrnes, 1996b).
The article is composed of four parts structured as follows: First, a literature review that covers scholars" opinion and studies of South Africa transition after 1994; bearing in mind that the research does not focus on democratic features of the new political system, but rather on changes in its two dimensions and the consequent shift of the system itself in the iconic fourfold classification (Byrnes, 1996b); the theoretical framework will clarify and outline the major components of the political systems, their definitions and the links that tie them together so closely. Here, the methodology will also be further clarified to analyze the political culture and the political structure; the third part will focus on an extensive analysis of data and results; the last section is left for the discussion of the findings and the conclusion.

HOW DID IT ALL START: SHORT HISTORY OF THE APARTHEID FALL
Apartheid lasted for 46 years, from 1948 to 1994. The tyranny of the white minority over the other ethnicities started to falter when President F.W. De Klerk recognized the urgent need to bring the black majority of South Africans into the political process, after the pressures of the violent protests and the isolation from the international community became unbearable for the developing country, and most NP moderates agreed with him in principle (Byrnes, 1996a, b;Baines, 1998). De Klerk held secret talks with the imprisoned ANC leader Nelson Mandela to begin preparations for this major policy shift (Mandela, 1994a, b). By the end of 1990, not without encountering opposition and critics from within his own party, De Klerk released Mandela, unbanned the ANC, the PAC, and the SACP, and removed of restrictions on other political organizations. He also lifted the four-year-old media restrictions, and invited former liberation fighters to join the government at the negotiating table to prepare for a new multiracial constitution (Byrnes, 1996b, c).
Negotiations took place against a backdrop of political violence in the country, and resulted in South Africa's first non-racial election, which was won by the ANC. In 1994, a democratic political system under a lawfully elected ANC government was established in South Africa. The change from an internationally-ostracized minority regime to a sovereign state legitimized under international law had finally be completed (Melber, 2002;Orkins, 1995;Wing, 1995). This process culminated in the Constitutional reform of 1996 that saw the political system of South Africa completely renewed.
The South African tricameral parliament established in 1983 was composed by race-based chambers: House of Assembly -178 white members, House of Representatives -85 mixed-race members and the House of Delegates -45 Indian members (Constitution, 1983). Needless to say, the Black population was not represented in Parliament (not even symbolically) and their right to vote was suppressed under Apartheid rule. The creation of the tricameral system was controversial on two fronts. On the one hand, many white conservatives opposed the participation of non-whites in politics; On the other hand, many coloreds and Asians rejected the system, as the chambers reserved for them were powerless (Pisani et al., 1990;Byrnes, 1996c;Orkins, 1995). In fact, the institutional design of the political system left the Parliament weakened and the position of Prime Minister nullified. Most authority was transferred to the State President, including the power to appoint the Cabinet.
With the new Constitution, a bicameral Parliament came into power. The National Assembly, the lower house of Parliament, consists of 400 members and is elected every five years by a system of party-list proportional representation. The National Council of Provinces, the upper house, consists of 90 members, with each of the nine provincial legislatures electing ten members (Constitution, 1996). This reform was not saluted unanimously by the international community. The first reforms in the post-Apartheid regime aimed at obtaining the right of self-determination and participation for the majority of the population, which had been segregated until then. The democratic transition was not given the same priority (Melber, 2002). Jung and Saphiro also argued that South Africa"s new Constitution was not a progress towards democracy, but rather proposed a power-sharing system of government based on consociational principles (Jung and Saphiro, 1995;Anderweg, 2000;Lijphart, 1969). In consociational systems opposed parties are encouraged to participate in government, incentivized towards cooperation rather than presenting opposing points of view and therefore opposition is not valued. In the South African case, the Parliament is said to completely dominate the agendasetting and the policy-making process, constraining the powers of the President of the Republic itself (Koeble and Reynolds, 1996;Anderweg, 2000;Lijphart, 1969).
For it is not of concern of this article to comment or analyze the quality of South African transition and reform and more on the direction of this shift will be said in the following sections, it suffices here to say that a change in the political structure of South African political system has indeed occurred. This change can be attributed to a previous shift in the political culture of the population. It will be clarified later that political structures and cultures are intrinsically connected: For the Congruence Theory, political structure should be tuned with and appropriate for the culture it stems from. Incongruence among the two leads to pressure for change of structure Verba, 1963, ed. 1989).
Thus, using the language of political culture theory, apartheid ultimately fell because the norms of racial separation, racial hierarchy and white superiority were rejected by the vast majority of the South African population. The political culture that once supported and justified racial segregation and the Apartheid rule had already undergone a major change that led to the change in the structure. However, according to Almond political views are inadvertently molded by direct experience (Almond et al., 2008). Subsequent life experiences may change political perspectives. But patterns of socialization can unify or divide. The same event can affect or impact the entire nation and its sensibility and political culture similarly; it can also lead to political gaps among subcultures.
It is therefore very likely that after the shut of the racial segregation, South African population was exposed to a (political) resocialization, assisted by the reform in the educational system (Harber, 2001). In 1998 South Africa implemented a new school curriculum intended, among other things, to promote democratic and other constitutional values (Mattes, 2012). Thus, the "Born Free" cohort have spent some or all of their high school years exposed to a pro-democracy curriculum and building their political cultures and orientations accordingly. As we shall see after, the schooling system and the values and norms passed in the early years of education are the roots of a political culture. Not surprisingly, schools are mentioned as "political socialization agents" by Almond himself (Almond et al., 2008: 52-56) (Figure 1).
The following two sections are going to first elaborate the theoretical and analytical framework and then analyze whether the political culture and/or structure in South Africa hanged after 1994 and whether consequentially the political system can be relocated in Almond"s fourfold classification.

A POLITICAL SYSTEM: COMPONENTS AND MEASURES
The events that have occurred in South Africa during the 1990s have deeply influenced the country"s society and history in the following years. The developments from then have been driven also by South Africa Educational reforms and by few other policies the Government implemented in order to integrate the classes of population that had been segregated until then. It was a relevant shift from the Apartheid regime that was brought about by an evident, urgent need expressed by the people and that manifested a deep change in the political culture of the country. The purpose of this article is to find out if these events and the consequential sociopolitical changes made the political system shift and how.
In order to answer the research question, a clarification of some key concepts and the study methodology is necessary.

Political systems and changes of political system
One of the most relevant contributions to the definition of political system came in 1953 by David Easton. He suggested that the study of politics is concerned with understanding how each of its institutions (or actors) interacts (Easton, 1953(Easton, , 1957. It is indeed clear that "each part of the larger political canvas does not stand alone but is related to each other part; or, to put it positively, that the operation of no one part can be fully understood without reference to the way in which the whole itself operates" (Easton, 1957: 383) (emphasis added). Then, by combining the results, we obtain a rough picture of what happens in any self-contained political unit in which the separate parts interact systematicallythe political system. His model of describing these relationships ( Figure 1) has spread and became the basic model applied extensively for approaching the study of political science. According to Easton, the political system works as a machine, processing inputsdemands and supportreceived from the electorate and turning them into effective outputsor policies (Easton, 1953(Easton, , 1957. Scholars of that time and following agreed that the political system itself is a system of actions and interactions (Easton, 1953(Easton, , 1957Almond, 1965Almond, , 1956Byrnes, 1996b;Pateman, 1971). The formula is very simple, but the theory was criticized for not being suitable for studying and explaining political change (Almond, 1965).
Gabriel Almond tried to shed light on the evolution and change of political systems by developing an alternative framework. In his work "A Developmental Approach to Political Systems" (1965), he asserts that the use of the concept of system reflects the penetration of functionalism and behaviouralism into political theory (Almond, 1965: 184;Malinowski, 1954;Radcliffe-Brown, 1957). Therefore, in order to analyze and understand the system, political scientists first have to empirically observe the behaviours of the social structures and institutions performing in the system (Almond, 1956(Almond, , 1965. The two main components of a political system in Almond"s model are rôles and political cultures.

Rôles and changes in rôles' interaction
A rôle is the unit of a political system (Almond, 1956, Parsons and Shils identify a rôle as "an organized sector of an actor"s orientation which constitutes and defines his participation in an interactive process" (Parsons and Shills, 1951: 23).
The concept can be further stretched to include formal offices, families, electorates and any form of social groupings that enter and affect the political system by interacting within it (Almond, 1956). Rôles are interdependent and their interaction affect the way the system works and is employed to deliver the requested outputs. The structure of rôles" interaction is the first dimension of Almond"s model.
It can be differentiatedmeaning that the functions and structure of the system are well defined and that power is distributedor undifferentiatedmeaning that the power is concentrated and that there is little division of roles (ibid.). With this in mind, it can be inferred that their interactions are regulated by some basic rules, be these conventional or established. These are to be partially found in a country"s Constitution, which outlines the institutions interacting in the system and their specific functions within it (Duverger, 1980). If a Constitutional reform is implemented and the design and patterns of the relations are amended with it, the roles themselves will change inherently (ibid.). However, a reform of the structure will not necessarily bring to a redistribution of power among rôles (and therefore to a shift in the classification). In order to fulfil the purpose of this article, the study will run a comparative document analysis of the two constitutions South Africa respectively adopted in 1983 and 1996, to test if power was actually redistributed by the latter among the modified institutions.

Political cultures and re-socialization
The specific patterns or orientations to political actions result from a set of core values, norms and perceptions of the political objects (Almond, 1956(Almond, , 2000Almond and Verba, 1963;Almond et al., 2008a;Dittmer, 1977;Melber, 2002;Silver and Dowley, 2000;Pateman, 1971). In their famous work "The Civic Culture", Almond and political change (Almond, 1965).  Verba precisely define it as "the specifically political orientationsattitudes toward the political system and its various parts, and attitudes toward the role of the self in the system" (Almond and Verba, 1963: 12-13) (emphasis added). A political culture is the result of childhood socialization, education, media exposure and adult experiences with governmental, social and economic performance and has therefore cognitive, affective and evaluative components (Almond, 2000). Knowledge and beliefs about political reality, feelings with respect to politics and commitments to political values are the main components and thus define the direction of a subject"s political action, ultimately affecting political and governmental structure and performance (Almond, 2000). Clearly political culture is not a static phenomenon: Changes can occur to and within the political culture itself. Although cultural norms typically change slowly and reflect stable values, political cultures change as people acquire their attitudes and values through the process of forming political values and transmitting the political culture from one generation to the next (Almond et al., 2008a). The socialization process can occur in different ways: Direct socialization involves an actor explicitly transferring political values or feelings; indirect socialization occurs when political views are inadvertently molded by experience (Almond et al., 2008a;Pateman, 1971). Moreover, although political culture is a common characteristic of a nation, values and beliefs can also vary within it: For instance, ethnic, religious or linguistic identities can shape citizens" values and influence the birth of various political (sub-) cultures (ibid.; Silver and Dowley, 2000). Almond and Verba (1963) outlined three pure categories of political culture based on level and type of political participation and the nature of people's attitudes toward politics: Parochial, subjective and participatory (Amond and Verba, 1963). However, for the purposes of this article another classification will be adopted. In his previous work on Comparative Political Systems (1956), Almond categorized political cultures as either homogeneous or heterogeneous, positioning this binary typology on the second dimension of his classification of political systems (Almond, 1956). In order to measure the level of homogeneity of the South African political culture, this article will select six variables from the WVS Waves 1 (1982) and 6 (2013) to observe whether the width of the variables" variance has changed significantly in a 30-year time period (Table 1).
The variance is the most appropriate figure to measure the homogeneity of a political culture as it measures how far a set of (random) numbers are spread out from their average value. If the political culture is homogeneous, the variance shall be little; the more heterogeneous the political culture, the larger the variance will be, as the respondents" perceptions will be spread far from the average value (Silver and Dowley, 2000). Following some critiques to his work (Dittmer, 1977), Almond distinguished three levels of system, process and policy, following that every political system has three levels of political culturesystem, process and policy (Almond, 2000(Almond, , 2008a. Although this further disaggregation is recognized and its interesting aspects that would make it worth exploring deeper, for resources, time and space constraints, the study will focus on the macro-level of the definition of political system and culture. However, broadly speaking and closely looking at the variables selected to measure the variation of political culture in South Africa, it is evident they recall the three levels pointed out by Almond (2008: 44): The National Pride is an example of the systemic level; the activity in labour unions and political parties and the interest in politics reflect the second aspect of political cultureprocess; the confidence in Parliament and the aims they would like the government to prioritize are perfect examples of citizens" satisfaction and policy expectations (third level). At this point, it is clear that political culture and structure exist in a symbiotic relationship. Political culture helps to form and sustain particular political institutions and structure; yet institutions also socialize people who work within them as well as succeeding generations of youngsters who grow up accepting them. So institutions foster and support cultures as well (Almond et al., 2008: 21). The two are somehow interdependent: When the properties of one component in a system change, all the others, and the system as a whole, are affected. This could lead to a shift in the classification of political systems as illustrated in Table 2. A brief description of the four categories is necessary at this point (Almond, 1956).

Totalitarian
Highly centralized power makes the rôles structure undifferentiated and the political culture"s homogeneity a façade to construct synthetic consent. Any delegation of power is strictly avoided and the structure is atomized, in order to destruct solidarity.

Pre-industrialized
A mix of political cultures and overlapping political systems can be observed in this context. Usually, the Western political culture and system have been forcefully implanted, and were never fully accepted. Rôles interact in unpredictable and unusual ways, not very structured and regulated.

Continental European
Political culture is fragmented in reminiscent old subcultures that somehow mixed with the Western political culture introduced lately. However, all the cultural variations share common roots and heritage. The political system is approached by rôles as a market on which they try to "sell" the political sub-culture they are embedded in, ultimately attempting to transform the political system itself.

Anglo-American
It is characterized by a secular and unified political culture, where the majority of actors share the broad political aims and means, in line with common values of freedom, mass welfare and security. Rôles" structure is highly differentiated and defined, as the rôles enjoy autonomy, but are also connected with each other in an organized and bureaucratized way, which gives stability to the system. Having outlined the theoretical and analytical framework in which this article operates, next is to turn to the empirical qualitative study of the two South African Constitutions and to the quantitative analysis of the variance of the aggregate variables taken as indicators for the South African political culture.

Constitutions and rôles' interactions
The 1982 Constitution of the Republic of South Africa Act (No. 110) outlined a mixed system. The most powerful figure was the President of the Republic (PR hereby), who served as head of state and chief executiveleading the government, but was elected by the majority of votes in Parliament. The two had also the same mandate length, normally five years (Constitution, 1982;artt. 7-9, 37). The PR shared executive authority with a cabinet, which he appointed from the tricameral Parliament, and with a Ministers Council chosen by him from the majority in each House of Parliament. In addition, the PR relied on a sixty-member President's Council for advice on urgent matters and for resolution of eventual disagreements among Houses of Parliament. The President's Council included twenty members from the House of Assembly, ten from the House of Representatives, five from the House of delegates, fifteen nominated by the PR, and ten nominated by opposition party leaders (ibid. artt. 70-78).
The tricameral Parliament worked alongside the PR, but claimed to have much less power, as the latter could dissolve the Parliament, or could extend it by up to six months beyond its five-year term (Byrnes, 1996). A major change distinguished this Parliament from the previous one: It was composed by three chambers in order to increase colored and Indian representations. Indeed, it encompassed a (white) House of Assembly (166 members), a (colored) House of Representatives (80 members), and an (Indian) House of Delegates (40 members) (Constitution 1982, artt. 41-43). However, the representation was disproportional and the two "informally lower" houses were much less powerful than the House of Assembly (Baines, 2007). The threechambered Parliament was based on a fundamental premise of the 1982 constitution, the distinction between a racial community's "own" affairs (encompassing education, health, housing, social welfare, local government, and some aspects of agriculture), and "general" affairs (encompassing defense, finance, foreign policy, justice, law and order, transport, commerce and industry, manpower, internal affairs, and overall agricultural policy). Thus, legislation "affecting the interests" of one community was deliberated upon by the appropriate House, but legislation on "general affairs" of importance to all races was handled by all three Houses of [30][31]. The president signed all legislation, and he also exercised administrative responsibility for black affairs.
Finally, the jurisdictional powers were all in the hands of the Supreme Court of South Africa (ibid. PART VII), that held the supreme jurisdiction over the executive and legislative power, ensuring a clear distinction and separation between the two spheres on one hand and the jurisdictional powers on the other. Clearly, the power in the Apartheid regime was highly concentrated in the political figure of the PR, who held the executive power and had a strong control over the Parliament. In Almond"s language, one could speak of undifferentiation in rôles" interactions structure, typical of Totalitarian and Preindustrialized political systems. The new political system embodied in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa of 1996 was established after an interim constitution providing for a Government of National Unity and for a five-year transition, during which the final constitution would be drafted by the Constitutional Assembly, consisting of the combined Senate and National Assembly. The 1996 Constitution established a parliamentary system sui generis, as the PR is still head of State and of the government, and therefore entitled of the power of appointing and removal of the Vice President and the Ministers, but he or she cannot dissolve the Parliament (Constitution, 1996; art. 84). However, as established in the art. XXX the latter can revoke the confidence in the PR and the government by absolute majority. The PR is elected by the National Assembly among its members for a five-year term and his/her mandate can be renewed only once. When elected, the PR loses the right to vote in Parliament (ibid. art. 86).
While the executive power is held by the PR and the Cabinet, the legislative is strongly controlled by the bicameral Parliament, composed by the National Assembly and National Council of Provinces. The former is the low chamber, composed by 350-400 members elected for 3 years (extended to 5 in later amendments) with a party-list proportional electoral system. It can consider, pass, amend or reject any legislation and initiate or prepare legislation, except money bills (ibid. artt. 44-46, 55, 73). It also elects the PR and has power of amendment of the Constitution. The second chamber is composed of a single delegation from each province consisting of ten delegates (90 members in total, see art.103) (ibid. art. 60). Each province has one vote, which is cast on behalf of the province by the head of its delegation and its powers coincide with the ones of the National Assembly, except being slightly diminished on certain affairs. Its decisions are taken with at least five provinces in favor of the question (ibid. art. 65, 68).
The 1996 Constitutions is still in force today. It clearly states that the government is constituted as national, provincial and local spheres of government which are distinctive, interdependent and interrelated, but all must observe and adhere to the principles of co-operative government and intergovernmental relations: "An organ of state involved in an intergovernmental dispute must make every reasonable effort to settle the dispute by means of mechanisms and procedures provided for that purpose, and must exhaust all other remedies before it approaches a court to resolve the dispute" (ibid. art. 40-41). Thus, whilst it clearly defines a separation of the different rôles and a differentiated structure in their interaction to distribute the powersas an Anglo-American or Continental European Constitution would do it also recognizes the risks and tries to prevent the disputes that may arise in what is perhaps still perceived as a highly differentiated and conflictual context of coexistence between different political cultures. The next section explores this aspect.

Political cultures
As mentioned in the theoretical section, the homogeneity of a political culture of a country is measurable with the variance width of the sample. The variance measures how far a set of (random) numbers are spread out from their average value: If the political culture is homogeneous, the variance shall be little; the more heterogeneous the political culture, the larger the variance will be, as the respondents" perceptions will be spread far from the average value (see above). Following several previous works that applied this approach to study political cultures (Ross, 2000;Melber, 2002;Silver and Dowley, 2000), six variables were selected from the WVS Waves 1 (1982) and 6 (2013) and computed them into a single variable Political Culture, in order to observe whether the width of the variable"s variance has changed significantly in a 30-year time period. This large time period allows for a generational change to occur, and the consequent shift of political culture that is expected or likely to follow a diriment event such as the fall of the Apartheid regime. Furthermore, the educational reform implemented after 1994 exposed young generations and the following "Born Frees" to values and resocialization compared to the previous generation (Mattes, 2012), which makes a change in the political culture even more likely.
The six variables selected are present and have the same alternative answers in both waves, and are therefore particularly reliable for comparison. Activity in labor union and in political initiatives scales from "nonmember", to "inactive member", to "active member". Aims of respondents show the priorities the individual thinks the government should pursue in its policies. The alternatives are "maintaining order in the nation", "giving people more say in important government decisions", "fighting rising prices", "protecting freedom of speech"; finally confidence in Parliament, Interest in politics and National Pride can rate "not at all" (confident; interested; proud), "not very much", "somewhat" and "very much".
To run the descriptive analysis of the variables, the study used SPSS and the data provided by the World Values Survey database and isolated the data for South Africa. In order to analyze the variance of the computed variable Political Culture, it was first recoded all the variables in order to make them go in the same direction and have more clarity. For example, Confidence in Parliament scored 3 for very interested and 0 for Not at all interested, while Activity in both political party and labor unions had the reversed scale (namely, 0 for Active member and 3 for Not a member). Therefore, all the variables were recorded consistently in both waves so to score 0 the less or absent engagement in politics or satisfaction with the system (Not a member, Not at all interested in politics, confident in parliament or proud). Then, the six variables were computed into one single Political Culture variable in both waves and a descriptive analysis of the variance, range and mean was done. Histograms were included in order to give a graphic representation of the variance (Figures 2 and 3).
The analysis of the first wave shows a quite homogeneous political culture. The variance for the South African sample is 6,085 and the Standard Deviation is 2,467. The distribution is normal, as the histogram shows, and a peak can be observed in correspondence of the mean. This aspect suggests a small variation in individuals" opinions and the relatively small width of the curve indicates a relatively homogeneous political culture. Of course there is some variation, but one could argue if this set of political culture combined with the undifferentiated political system previously observed could be indicative of a preindustrialized political system tending to totalitarianism. After all, the Apartheid was in a sense a dictatorship of the South African white minority and my research of the field has brought to the evidence that the governments under the Apartheid regime provided wrong or distorted information and education to the South African population in order to build a fitting (political) culture and to maintain the regime (INT. 01, 2019).
The second wave had a larger sample compared to the first one: 3287 people took part in the survey, while they were only 1200 in the first wave. Although the variance does not depend on the sample size, one could expect a decrease of the variance given and an increase of the sample size as an effect of the Law of Large Numbersas sample size increases, cases will converge to the mean, reducing the variance. However, as Figure 3 shows, in 2013, after the Apartheid regime fell and the generational change had time to root in the society, the variance of the political culture doubled to 12,423 compared to the one in 1982. The difference is also appreciable by looking at the two histograms: The second shows a wider base and the distribution is less peaked in the center, meaning both that the Standard Deviation is higher (3,525 in 2013) and that opinions are more heterogeneous, as they differ more from one another. This evident enlargement and heterogeneous movement cross-checked with the change observed in the Constitution and rôles" interactive structure after 1994, make a reconsideration of the political system necessary. In 30 years, South Africa went through a drastic change from what was a very centralized power setting and a quite homogeneous political culture to a well-defined and power-distributing Constitution and a wider, more heterogeneous political culture.
The answer to the initial research question is therefore positive: The aforementioned change can also be read as a shift of South African political system from a Pre-Industrialized/Totalitarian system to the Continental European type, where political culture is fragmented in reminiscent old sub-cultures. Indeed, today"s South Africa is also called the "Rainbow Nation" due to its population"s diversity: It has 11 official languages and recognized population groups, which nonetheless share common roots and heritage. The diversities often create conflicts within the society and are mirrored by the political actors, who approach the political system as a market on which they try to "sell" the political sub-culture they are embedded in. However, the interactions between roles is well defined and differentiated, as each institution has powers, checks and balances and the power is not centralized as it was in the Apartheid regime.

CONCLUSION
This article aims to analyze the cultural and political change occurring in South Africa after the fall of the Apartheid regime in 1994. Building on the work of Almond and Verba, a political system is composed by the interaction of rôles (differentiated and undifferentiated) and the political culture (heterogeneous and homogeneous) in a country (Almond, 1956(Almond, , 2000Almond and Verba, 1963;Almond et al., 2008). This leads to a four-fold classification reported in Table 2: A political system is classifiable either as Totalitarian, Preindustrialized, Continental European or Anglo-American (Almond, 1956). A change in one of the two components is likely to trigger a change in the other, as well as a shift of the system from one type to the other (ibid.). Previous studies and observations had reported that such a shift can occur, inter alia, after a marking event affecting the whole population of a country (Almond, 1956(Almond, , 2000Almond and Verba, 1963 1977; Melber, 2002;Silver and Dowley, 2000;Pateman, 1971).
After 46 years of racial domination of the white minority (informally, it stared much earlier) and violent riots and protests, the segregation regime was shut under President de Klerk and the first democratic election were held in 1994. The rest, as it is said, is history. The election of Nelson Mandela led to a Constitutional reform that changed the structure of the interactions between political institutions and actors, making it more differentiated and less power-centered. The political culture that was to a certain extent synthetically held more homogeneous than it would have been became more heterogeneous after the marking events of 1994, as the educational reform was implemented and the generational change rooted in the new generations. The diffusion of democratic values and a higher degree of freedom in the country also contributed to diversify opinions and to the widening of the political culture heterogeneity, making the system shift from a Preindustrialized/Totalitarian political system to a Continental European one.
The answer to the initial research question is therefore positive: The events and movements in the early 1990s triggered a change in the South African political culture and political interactions. This ultimately leads to a shift of the system according to Almond"s classification from a Pre-industrialized/Totalitarian political system to a Continental European one. However, there are aspects of this shift this article could not address, but that would be a good starting point for future research. In particular it is worth noting that most analyses of political culture have assumed the existence of a national political culture. The article also shared this approach. To ascribe a political culture to a society implicitly assumes that the members of a society share some common attitudes and values. However, the assumption of common values is often better met by ethnic groups than by the aggregate population of an entire country, especially in an ethnically diverse environment as South Africa is. Ethnic identifications are a principal alternative to national affiliations (Silver and Dowley, 2000) and the most likely source of systematic within-country variation in political culture. The level of agreement on basic political values by members of different ethnic groups in multi-ethnic societies may be critical to the analysis of the political system as a whole, and for sure it is an aspect worth exploring in future research.

CONFLICT OF INTERESTS
The author has not declared any conflict of interests.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author thanks the Research Master in European Studies at Universiteit Maastricht for funding the research and Prof. Dr. André Kaiser for his constructive feedback and support during the course at Universität zu Köln.