Apartheid is a regulatory system designed to effect redistributions in favor of white workers and farmers at the expense of black workers and white capitalists. This paper uses a competitive interest group theory of the apartheid state to formulize a collective choice analysis of apartheid as endogenous policy. The “level” of apartheid is conceived as a continuous variable that is determined by the relative influence of competing interest groups within the white polity and by the costs of maintaining and defending apartheid institutions. Some empirical implications of this approach are explo