Renowned for its “people” foundation, democracy has become the regime type against which we compare all other regime types: a gold standard of government structure . Because of this ideal, it is of comparative interest to understand how to classify regimes as democratic or dictatorial. The Polity IV measure is a standard for democracy that assigns a score to a country (from -10 to +10) based on how democratic or dictatorial its electoral processes and government procedures are. Post-independence Zimbabwe is a country that classifies itself as a parliamentary democracy, however, due to a history of electoral scandals and the maintenance of power by the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU, the current ruling party) for over thirty years, Polity IV has given them a “mixed regime type” score of -4. (Clark, Golder and Golder 160) The purpose of this article is to argue that Zimbabwe does not have a mixed regime, but rather employs an authoritarian-style regime. After outlining the controversial events resulting from the 2000 general election and the 2002 presidential election, I...