Introduction The match between citizens’ aspirations and the promises made by political parties comes to fore most strongly when elections are pending. The presumption is that the parties contesting an election have been building their manifestos in a careful dialogue with their members, as well as finding ways to persuade the electorate at large to have confidence in the manifesto. The big question is over the extent to which political parties really understand what citizens want from governance, and, has become clear in a major UN survey (MY WORLD. 2015), the desires are a mixture of both service delivery and governance issues. Asking 16 basic questions, the survey asked the respondents to choose the top six issues that they thought were crucial to good governance. Four questions dealt with governance issues: An honest and responsive government, equality between men and women, freedom from discrimination and persecution, and political freedoms. “Honest and responsive government” is one of the most common desires by citizens internationally, the sample now representing almost 9,736,484 respondents from 194 countries. Building on the data from an earlier version of this survey, several British workers took a smaller sample from the UN. Using results from only those countries where more than one thousand persons voted, they ended up with a sample of 1.3 million (out of 1.5 million) respondents from 74 countries (Bergh, Menocal & Takeuchi. 2014). The general finding was that citizens’ main concerns are whether governments deliver public goods and services, but not to the exclusion of issues around the “form” of governance. The main point made in this ODI study is that issues about governance are probably more important than is often accepted in development assistance: A crucial message emerging from the analysis, which draws from both the MY World survey and other, more detailed global and regional perception surveys (particularly the regional Barometers), is that, when thinking about governance, people tend to care first and foremost about state effectiveness and the ability of the state to deliver (be it in terms of generating growth and jobs, providing basic services, ensuring a more equitable distribution of the ‘goods’ provided, etc.). In other words, their view of governance is quite instrumental, based on outcomes and not necessarily on which normative attributes that should be inherent to governance or particular forms it should take. This is clearly illustrated in MY World survey results, which show that respondents overwhelmingly privilege ‘an honest and responsive government’ over other options that also have important governance dimensions, including ‘political freedoms’.(Bergh, Menocal & Takeuchi. 2014. p 13) How might these findings apply to politics and citizens’ perceptions of the form and function of politics in Zimbabwe? Zimbabwe and governance Zimbabwe was included in the final MYWorld sample, and now (2018) 16,249 Zimbabweans have voted. The Zimbabwean sample is not strongly representative of Zimbabwe as a whole: there are more males and it appears to be more educated than the 2012 census would show, and sees “honest and responsive government” in fifth place as opposed to fourth for whole world sample. Zimbabweans placed education, healthcare, job opportunities, and access to clean 2