Executive Summary Afrobarometer surveys on Zimbabwe frequently run into criticism about both the methodology and the findings. This was the case with the public release of the Round 7 (2017) survey results. A particular bone of contention was what to make of apparently contradictory findings. For example, participants were confused by the findings that a majority of Zimbabweans both trust and fear the President, Robert Mugabe. This confusion was driven apparently by a failure to appreciate the limitations of quantitative research. The methodological confusion was answered by the Afrobarometer itself (Howard & Logan. 2017), but another issue emerged from the criticism. This was more interesting, and we hypothesized that this might derive from the actual knowledge base of the critics. It raised the question about whether the critics were as informed about the views and opinions of the Zimbabwean polity as they claimed. It led us to speculate that the critics were an “elite”, and, as such, more detached from the reality of public opinion than they knew. There was some basis for this hypothesis derived from an earlier study that suggested the middle class was composed of “disconnected democrats” (RAU. 2015). Accordingly, we derived a test of this hypothesis by constructing a measure of “elitism”. We used this measure to test political agency in a comparative fashion: we compared the opinions and expressed behaviours of “elites” and “non-elites”. We looked at seven indices of political agency:        Voice – the ability to express one’s views in public around political issues: feeling free to express one’s views and criticise officials; Community Participation – the ability to participate in public activities: belonging to organisations and participating in community activities; Political Participation – the ability to participate in political activities, with elections as the chosen vector: discussing politics, voting, and participating in electoral events; Activism – active contact with duty bearers such as MPs, local government officials, government officials, etc. Political Trust – trust in public officials and bodies, such as the president, parliament, ZEC, the police, etc. Support for democracy – preferring democracy and being satisfied with Zimbabwe’s democracy; Political party affiliation – expressed support for a political party. Given our overall research question - are the views of the elite grounded in their experience of engagement in the general political life of Zimbabwe – we examined five sub-hypotheses as follows:      Voice – Elites should have higher scores on voice; Community participation – Elites should have higher scores on community participation; Political participation – Elites should have higher scores on political participation; Activism – Elites should have higher score on activism; Support for democracy – Elites should have higher scores on support for democracy; 3