The Political Economy of Language Regime Change: Lessons from South Africa.

The notion that the careful design and engineering of formal political institutions could help mollify group conflict in a society that might otherwise be prone to it is, for obvious reasons, an encouraging one. Although scholars may not always agree with one another about the most desirable forms for these formal institutions to take, most scholars do agree that the formal political institutions in a new democracy and the incentives they offer to political elites competing for power in a new environment can have profound consequences for that country's democratic endurance (or lack thereof). In this paper, I consider the nature of a much less "formal" institution which receives too little attention in the literature on democracy in divided societies: language regimes. I argue that language regimes are too little understood in comparative politics and that efforts to rectify this might lead to an enhanced disciplinary understanding of democratic transition and democratic endurance, particularly in diverse societies. This paper first introduces the concept of "language regime" and articulates its importance for the study of democratic regime change in comparative politics. It then develops a basic framework for understanding the political economy of language regime change and illustrates the usefulness of this framework using the case of language regime change in the post-apartheid South Africa. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]