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South African social welfare policy: an analysis using the ethic of careAbstract New policies have been developed in South Africa since the demise of apartheid. This article examines one of these policy documents -the White Paper for Social Welfare -using the lens of a feminist political ethic of care. The ethic of care is used to trace the normative framework of this policy document and to make judgements about how adequately issues of care, welfare and citizenship are dealt with. Policy texts display authoritative ways of talking about care and contain a range of gendered assumptions in the way that they represent social practices of care. The article proposes that the White Paper for Social Welfare inserts care principally into a familialist framework. This framework does not address current South African social problems in an adequate manner, nor does it correspond with social justice principles that are endorsed in the White Paper. The contribution that the ethic of care can make in solving the problems that are identified in the analysis of the White Paper for Social Welfare is elaborated on. It is proposed that care should be positioned in notions of citizenship rather than family or community. In this way, the responsibility for care would be deprivatized and made a common concern, centrally placed in human life.

In an effort to put its past firmly behind, the New South Africa created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to document human rights abuses under apartheid and to grant amnesty to those confessing their nefarious deeds. South Africa's democratic experiment depends mightily upon whether truth does in fact bring about reconciliation. Consequently, we examine whether ordinary South Africans accept the theories of blame that underlie the truth and reconciliation process. Based on a formal experiment within a representative sample of South Africans, our results confirm some conventional hypotheses (e.g., leaders are judged more responsible for their deeds than followers), repudiate others (noble motives do little to exonerate violent actions), and modify still others (actors are judged by the severity of their action's consequences, although it matters little whether “combatants” or “civilians” were the victims). We conclude that the dark legacy of the apartheid past makes the consolidation of the democratic transformation problematical.

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The purpose of this research is to examine the effect of political context on tolerance judgments. Using an experiment embedded within a representative sample of the South African mass public, we explore the impact of four contextual factors on tolerance judgments. Generally, we discover that the actual attributes of a civil liberties dispute have little or no impact on tolerance judgments. Rather, pre-existing threat perceptions strongly dominate perceptions of the context, rendering impotent the "facts" of the dispute itself. We speculate that these findings are largely a function of the intense political divisions in South Africa. Because inter-group animosities are so strong, objective situational factors matter little in deciding whether to tolerate a hated political enemy. Thus, we conclude that context does indeed matter for tolerance, but that in countries like South Africa, the intensity of political conflict is far more significant than the characteristics of individual civil liberties disputes.