This research investigates how single-party dominance affects interpersonal trust in post-Apartheid South Africa, a context where race-based social enmity has persisted alongside democratic competition. Evidence comes from trust games played by more than 2,000 subjects that reveal how partisanship and race shape trust decisions.

🧪 Trust Games in a Dominant-Party Context

• More than 2,000 participants in post-Apartheid South Africa completed incentivized trust games to measure interpersonal trust.
• The setting combines ongoing race-based social tensions with electoral competition dominated by a single party.

📈 Clear Patterns of Partisan Distrust

• Partisan-based trust discrimination is strongest among individuals who identify with the main opposition party.
• This pattern is driven primarily by strong distrust of rival partisans rather than symmetric mutual suspicion.

⚖️ Partisanship Versus Race: Stereotypes on Trustworthiness

• The findings provide additional evidence on the relative weights of trustworthiness stereotypes tied to partisanship and to race.
• The results preserve nuance about how both identity categories influence trust without claiming a single dominant driver.

🔎 Why This Matters

• The evidence underscores that electoral competition broadly shapes trust across party lines and that one-sided competition can produce asymmetrical trust effects between parties in dominant-party systems.
• These dynamics have implications for social cohesion, cross-group cooperation, and the functioning of democratic accountability in societies with entrenched party dominance.