Couple questions:
1) How free and fair were these elections (for the white electorate)?
2) NP and KP electorates seem fairly obvious. Any major differences between NRP and PFP supporters?
To expand a little on Parochial Boy's excellent post regarding the NRP, the party effectively carried the torch for the old United Party's (the party of Smuts) largely incoherent political platform, which could probably be summed up as the 'Rhodesia Solution'. In other words, continued segregation (although not to the extent encoded in
apartheid legislation) and (broadly speaking), whites only elections, until some vague, indeterminable future point at which the black population would gradually be encouraged to play a role more commensurate to their proportion of the population in the life of the country. Of course, as we'll see, there were many dissenters from this broad view on both the left and right of the party. In addition, as the NRP formed in 1977, to this broad formula was added support for 'confederation' and 'decentralisation' as the solution to the country's racial issue, something which would later, in large part, be stolen by Botha's National Party.
In terms of MP's and support, in essence the NRP represented the moderate rump of the UP, which started to implode in 1975 when a liberal group based in Transvaal, led by Harry Schwartz, broke off from that party to form the Reform party, before merging with the Progressive party, an older liberal UP breakaway that had split off in 1959 to protest the party's muted response to the government's abolition of the Native Representation Seats, to form the PFP. Although there were attempts to reunify the UP with the PFP prior to the 1977 general election, these ran into the opposition of a group of six right-wing UP MP's led by Myburgh Streicher and John Wiley (both of whom later became National Party cabinet ministers), who themselves split off to form the South African Party, which took a firmly white supremacist stance with regards to the racial question. So what you had left, effectively, were MP's who weren't quite liberal enough to make the jump to the PFP, but also not quite conservative enough to begin the migration to the National Party, most of whom, as Parochial Boy says, were based in rural areas of Natal. As a caveat to that, the provincial NRP was a fair bit more liberal than the federal NRP, as the former still enjoyed support in urban Natal, with that branch of the party pursuing an attempt to try and form a joint government for Natal and the black homeland of KwaZulu.
So, incoherence all round really.
