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Support
for Democracy and Democratic Institutions
Mass Public Opinion
Institute (MPOI)
February, 2006
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Zimbabweans
exhibit solid support for democracy and democratic institutions but never
seem to get enough of it. This is according to the survey results of the
Afrobarometer Round 3.
A perennial set of
questions in the Afrobarometer series relates to democracy, the demand
for it, its supply, and support for democratic institutions. Round 3 of
the survey repeated this set of issues, and given the existence now of
three data sets, trends and patterns are beginning to emerge.
The survey was conducted
from 9 to 26 October 2005 and covered both urban and rural segments of
all ten administrative provinces in Zimbabwe. It was based on a double
sample: a nationally representative random main sample of 1096 respondents
and a purposeful sub-sample of 104 respondents comprising victims of the
Government's Operation Murambatsvina/Restore Order. In both cases, respondents
were Zimbabwean men and women of voting age. Because of disruptions of
field work by some unruly political elements, completion of the survey
was aborted and in the end 1048 interviews of the main sample and 64 of
the sub-sample were completed totalling 1112 interviews. All fieldwork
was done by the Mass Public Opinion Institute (MPOI), a Zimbabwean non-governmental
research organisation.
Four teams of Enumerators
were deployed in the country's ten provinces. Face to face interviews
were conducted using an 88-question survey instrument translated into
the country's three main languages i.e. English, Ndebele and Shona. Data
entry and analysis was done in the Institute's Computer Laboratory using
the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) Version 13.
Demand for Democracy
In the October 2005 survey, support for democracy is unambiguous among
adult Zimbabweans who had a decided opinion on the question with exactly
two thirds stating that "democracy is preferable to any other kind
of government." This is a substantial increase from the 48% of the
citizens who preferred this form of government in mid-2004. However, the
2005 statistic is still 5 percentage points down compared to the1999 statistic
of 71% who preferred democracy to any other type of government. As such,
there has been a dramatic 'rebirth' in faith for democracy when compared
to 2004 from less than one half just a year ago to two-thirds of citizens,
the same proportion as in 1999. A worrying statistic is that more than
a quarter (27%) of the respondents, 3 percentage points higher than the
2004 figure (itself a whopping 19 percentage points higher than in 1999
when only 5% of respondents professed ignorance on the matter), said they
do not have an opinion on the desirability of democracy.
Several propositions
spring to mind. The first could be linked to conceptual illiteracy. In
the 2005 survey, more than a third (37%) did not understand the term 'democracy'
even after a local language translation (see Figure 1). This represents
a big jump from the 19% who in 1999 gave a "don't know/can't explain"
answer when asked about the meaning of 'democracy. Why the level of conceptual
illiteracy should have doubled in six years is difficult to explain. Whatever
the case, the reality is that if people can not understand the concept
of democracy, they obviously can not associate themselves with something
they do not understand.
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