These were all interesting findings at the level of the frequency data and were all statistically
significant differences, but we decided to test the hypotheses more empirically.
Hypothesis testing
The first test was to use “Apostolic” as the independent variable, tested against a variety of
dependent variables. This was in line with our general hypothesis.
Table 8: Do Apostolics have stronger affiliation to ZANU-PF than other religions?
Apostolic
[n=147)
Lived Poverty
Social Capital
Political Fear
Political Trust
Close to MDC-T
Close to ZANU-PF
Reticent about closeness
Vote for MDC-T
Vote for ZANU-PF
Reticent about voting
.342
-.178
.778
-.070
.111
-.018
-.048
Other
religions
[n=1053]
-.178
.778
-.070
.111
-.018
-.048
.139
.14
-.06
.00
-.06
.00
.00
Df
1198
1198
1198
1198
1198
1198
1198
1198
1198
1198
t
-.237
3.534
-1.212
2.619
-2.423
2.651
-.415
-1.487
3.255
-1.330
Sig
(2-tailed)
ns
0.0000
ns
0.0090
0.0160
0.0080
ns
ns
0.0010
ns
According to the common assumption and the frequency data, the Apostolic group should show
affiliation to the ruling party, ZANU-PF, which they do, both as being close to the party and
voting for ZANU-PF.
However, given that previous research indicates that all measures – Social Capital, Political
Trust and Political Fear – are differentially distributed between rural and urban areas in
Zimbabwe (refs here), this may have been an artefact of “residence”. It is probable that rural
residence is a confounding factor in many measures of political participation and active
citizenship, and thus the relatively high frequency of “reticents” amongst even the Apostolics
(Table 7) may be masking this factor. It was also evident, at least on this sample, that Apostolics
were fairly evenly distributed across the Provinces in Zimbabwe (Figure 1), and the only
significantly high frequencies of Apostolics were found in Masvingo and the Midlands.
Thus, when residence (rural or urban) is used as the independent variable, political participation
by religious groups is seen to be more a result of rural residence than being associated with any
single religion (Table 9 over).
8