Sources and citations

Some of the information in the Coalitions Barometer Dataset has been sourced from official bodies. These are the seats each party won in a council or legislature, population, the expenditure amounts the AGSA reports, and the codes that identify each municipality and province. Everything else is MISTRA’s own original work, based on our coding of each council and legislature. This page explains where the information came from and acknowledges the sources that were used.

Election results and seats

Seat allocations follow the official results published by the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC): the 2021 local government elections and subsequent by-elections for municipal councils, and the 2024 general election for the national and provincial legislatures. The typology fields are calculated from these seat counts together with MISTRA’s coding of each party’s role; the ideological classification of each administration is MISTRA’s own judgement.

Population

Population figures come from Statistics South Africa’s Census 2022: the Census 2022 Municipal fact sheet (Report No. 03-01-82, revised edition) for municipalities, and Statistical Release P0301.4 for provinces and the country as a whole.

Audit and finance indicators

The three expenditure amounts (unauthorised, irregular, and fruitless and wasteful expenditure) are taken from reports published by the Auditor-General of South Africa (AGSA). The audit outcome for each municipality is coded from the outcomes the AGSA reported, and the municipal category follows the classification in Annexure 3 of the AGSA’s MFMA 2020-21 consolidated general report.

Municipal and province codes

Municipal codes follow those used by the Municipal Demarcation Board, Statistics South Africa and the IEC, and province codes follow the Municipal Demarcation Board’s form (for example GT, KZN and NC). The national code, ZA, is the ISO 3166-1 code for South Africa.

Coalition coding

The roles each party played, the officeholders, the dates on which administrations formed and ended, and the way each one ended are MISTRA’s coding. For the period they cover, the source of record is the two earlier volumes in the series, MISTRA Coalitions Barometer 2021–2023 and MISTRA Coalitions Barometer II 2023–2025, supplemented by council minutes, municipal documents, press reports and court records. From February 2025 to the data cut-off of 28 February 2026, coding rests on contemporaneous primary sources: council minutes, statements by the parties themselves, municipal documents, court records, IEC by-election results and press reports.

We keep an evidence register that links coded values to the specific sources behind them. If you believe a value is wrong, we welcome corrections with a supporting source, sent to coalitions@mistra.org.za. Corrections will be listed in the release notes of future versions.

Calculated fields

Identifiers, durations, counts and thresholds are calculated by MISTRA from the columns above, and the codebook sets out how each one is derived. A small number of flags, such as whether a start date is approximate, record a coding judgement rather than a calculation.

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the IEC, Statistics South Africa, the AGSA and the Municipal Demarcation Board as the sources of the figures described above. The analysis built on those figures, including the calculated fields and classifications, is MISTRA’s own processing of their data.

Licence and reuse

The Coalitions Barometer Dataset, its documentation and the analysis scripts are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence, except for the following figures, which were published by other bodies: Total_Seats and the seat columns, [Party]_Seats and IND1_Seats (IEC); Population (Statistics South Africa); the unauthorised, irregular, and fruitless and wasteful expenditure amounts (AGSA); and Geo_Code (Municipal Demarcation Board, Statistics South Africa and the IEC; the national code, ZA, is the ISO 3166-1 code). These figures remain subject to the terms of the bodies that published them. Anyone reusing them should check those terms and acknowledge the original publisher as well as MISTRA. The public dataset does not include copies of the source documents.