Clientelism and Democratic Consolidation in Pakistan: Challenges to Accountability and Political Modernization

Abstract

This article looks at the undermining of democratic consolidation in Pakistan through clientelism by looking at the civilian transition as of 2008 without involving the military takeovers. It explores patronage network in Punjab province to determine their different influences on vertical accountability and bureaucratic modernization. Nevertheless, the fragility of Pakistan democracy stands despite the occasional change to the civilian rule since the patron-client relationship system is so entrenched that individual loyalty is given preferential treatment over programmatic politics. Clientelist has continued to exist within the leading political parties and it is a systematic way of removing institutional accountability and creating a skewed representative relationship between citizens and the state. The research design of this work is based on a qualitative approach, which presupposes the use of semi-structured interviews with 50 national and provincial legislators and ethnographic observation of the activities of constitutions politics in 2019-2023. The thematic analysis has conducted in order to determine the distribution pattern of patronage and their institutional implications. The results indicate that clientelism undermines democratic consolidation in that it replaces performance-based legitimacy with personalized exchange policies that make legislators put constituency service over oversight of the legislature. The mechanized undermining of bureaucratic neutrality is carried out through politically oriented transfers whereas electoral competition resorts to selective allocation of the state resources and not the supply of public goods. The overpowering presence of kinship-based biraderi networks strengthens the traditional systems of authority, which hindering the formation of programmatic party platforms needed to bring about political modernization. Therefore, the accountability mechanisms are still superficial because citizens are willing to judge the representatives on the access to patronage, but not on policy performance. To isolate bureaucracy to political influence, institutional reforms must increase civil service protection and implement merit-based hiring. The political parties will have to embrace transparent selection criteria of candidates and in-house democratic processes. Moreover, considerable dependency of citizens on clientelist networks can be gradually diminished by increasing formal social safety nets by using state institutions instead of patronage brokers.

Keywords: Patronage networks, Vertical accountability, Bureaucratic neutrality, Electoral competition, Institutional reform

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18461185