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 roles (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 roles’ interactions, as well as a consequent shift of the political system from a Pre-industrialized/Totalitarian to a Continental European one.   Key words: Apartheid, political system, roles, political culture, comparative analysis.