ABSTRACT
This chapter will explore a few dimensions of the causal relationship between policy choices by political actors and institutional development in South Africa. Larry Diamond has argued the issue involved as follows:
Political leadership—both of individual government and party leaders, and of political leaders conflicting and conciliating as a group—can make a difference both to the success and failure of democratic development. But the extent of that difference depends not only on the qualities of leadership, but on the nature of the social, economic, cultural, and political conditions in which it operates. Moreover—and this is the most crucial linkage that is often missed—those conditions themselves are not just given: they are significantly the product of the policies, choices and decisions of previous generations of leaders (Diamond 1989, P. 3).
