Explore the critical debate surrounding Zimbabwe's Constitutional Amendment Bill No. 3, which questions the validity of direct presidential elections versus a parliamentary system.. In Picture: Kelvin Jakachira
In the current debate over Zimbabwe's Constitution of Zimbabwe Amendment No. 3 Bill (CA3), opponents have deployed a headline count: a large majority of countries in the world directly elect their president, while only a minority do so indirectly.
The numerical framing is intended to suggest that direct election is the democratic mainstream and that CA3's proposed return to indirect parliamentary election of the president is a retreat from it.
The previous phase of this research established that the 108 direct-election states, when disaggregated by region and regime history, are composed overwhelmingly of former military regimes, former one-party states, former socialist states, and current authoritarian systems.
That finding, which revealed that the majority was built by dictatorships rather than democracies, reversed the opposition's framing of the count.
