Lived Poverty (LP) would be higher in rural as opposed to urban residents;
Service Availability (SA) would be greater in urban as opposed to rural areas;
Service Delivery (SD) should be worse in rural as opposed to urban areas;
Based on previous research, Social Capital (SC) would be higher in rural
areas;
Support for Democracy (Dem) should be higher in rural areas;
Political Trust (PT) should be higher in rural areas;
Finally, State Responsiveness (SR) should be higher in rural areas given the
ruling party’s reliance of the rural areas as a reservoir of political support
and the use of patronage to achieve this.
The data was analysed in SPSS (20). Frequencies, correlations and tests of means were carried
out.
Results
The first analysis was in examining the relationships between the various indices.
Table 2: Correlations between indices
RurUrb
RurUrb
1
Service Availability
(SA)
Service Delivery (SD)
Lived Poverty (LP)
Social Capital (SD)
Support for
Democracy (SD)
Political Trust (PT)
State Responsiveness
(SR)
SA
.629**
SD
-.080**
LP
-.130**
SC
-.317**
SD
-.039
PT
-.111**
SR
-.203**
1
-.032
-.066*
-.217**
-.006
-.108**
-.141**
1
.299**
.255**
.475**
.446**
.594**
1
.082**
.181**
.107**
.157**
1
.232**
.227**
.284**
1
.385**
.353**
1
.531**
1
** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (two-tailed); * Correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed).
State Responsiveness was associated with Service Delivery, Lived Poverty, Social Capital,
Political Trust and Support for Democracy, but Service Availability and Residence (RurUrb)
were not. Since Service Delivery was the more direct contribution from the state, this supports
the overall theory that it is actual delivery that matters to citizens, as suggested by other
research (Bergh, Rocha & Takeuchi. 2014).
It was interesting that urban residence (RurUrb) was negatively associated with all indices apart
from Service Availability, which suggests, as with other research on Zimbabwean citizens, a
strong split in views between urban and rural citizens. Thus, beliefs in State Responsiveness
(honest and responsive government) are not universally distributed amongst Zimbabweans as
suggested by the UN MYWorld.
Testing hypotheses
In order to test for causality, the directionality of the association, we examined this by testing
for differences in means on the indices.
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