Voting Preferences of Protesters and Non-protesters in Three South African Elections (2014–2019): Revisiting the ‘Ballot and the Brick’ Carin Runciman , Martin Bekker and Terri Maggott Centre for Social Change, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between protest and voting by revisiting Booysen’s ‘ballot and the brick’ thesis. Booysen argued that, in South Africa, protest forms part of a ‘dual repertoire’ that poor communities use to fight for service delivery between elections but that protesters, ultimately, remain loyal to the African National Congress (ANC). Since Booysen first elaborated this argument the political landscape has altered considerably. The ANC has suffered declines in electoral support at a time when protest across many social spheres has been increasing. Yet, there is little scholarship that attempts to examine the relationship between these two phenomena. This article addresses this gap through the analysis of data collected in three surveys of South African voters. Our analysis reveals that while the ANC remains the party of preference of both voters who have not engaged in protest and those that have not, we find that opposition parties are, to a greater extent, characterised by voting protesters. We suggest that party loyalty to the ANC has become a much less binding constraint on voting protesters’ indirect and direct political actions. Introduction In South Africa, it has become common that in the months preceding an election for there to be threats to boycott elections should demands around ‘service delivery’ not be met (see Mkhize and Raubenheimer 2014; Ntshobane 2016; Khumalo 2019). Yet, come election day, few of these boycotts seem to materialise. This has led to a general view, supported and furthered by Booysen’s(2007, 2012) ‘ballot and the brick’ thesis that, in South Africa, protest forms part of a ‘dual repertoire’ that poor communities use to fight for service delivery between elections but that protesters, ultimately, remain loyal to the party of lib- eration, the African National Congress (ANC) at election time. When Booysen first made this argument over a decade ago, electoral results seemed to support this thesis. 1 However, much has altered from the time when Booysen first made this argument. Com- munity protests have increased in scale (Alexander et al. 2018), the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) emerged as an opposition party and the trade union movement fractured over its support for the ANC (Gentle 2015). Although the ANC has retained power, it has done so with a declining share of the electorate’s vote, suggesting a significant weakening and fragmenting of its hegemony. The purpose of this article is to explore the relationship between voting and protesting and to consider whether the ‘dual repertoire’ thesis holds over a decade since it was first made. © 2019 South African Association of Political Studies CONTACT Carin Runciman crunciman@uj.ac.za Centre for Social Change, University of Johannesburg, Bunting Road Campus, House 5, Research Village POLITIKON https://doi.org/10.1080/02589346.2019.1682763