Law and Order, the Coercive State and Pakistan's Party Systems

• In Event: Anti-Corruption Politics and Reactionary Populism

Abstract

In 2018, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Isaaf won a plurality of seats in the National Assembly, and Imran Khan became prime minister of a coalition government. The complicated outcomes of these elections, both at national and provincial levels, represents puzzles for comparative politics: the PTI was able to dominate in certain constituencies while winning other seats much more competitively; this variation in the competitiveness of the vote is not easily explained by either “rigging” or by the clientelism that is thought to explain democratic elections in developing countries. We argue that in order to explain the 2018 elections in Pakistan, as well as other competitive elections throughout the developing world, we must take seriously the causal impact of the coercive apparatus of the state – as conceptually distinct from elected governments – as driving the vote in developing countries. Two aspects of Pakistani politics – reflected in the dynamics of different, regional party systems – associate the coercive state with particular forms of electoral mobilization. The first is the extent to which parties that represent “law-and-order” and crusades against corruption can represent credible alternatives to machine politics when urban political machines are violently challenged. Thus, the PTI won seats in the metropolis of Karachi after the protection rackets of the MQM faltered due to paramilitary operations against organized crime. Second and more profoundly, the PTI as a “law-and-order” party was able to capture significant support in areas in Pakistan’s northwest that had been most affected by the Taliban insurgency. The PTI’s own tenure as the technocratically-inclined provincial government of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, and its implicit but widely understood alignment with the military allowed the PTI, uniquely among political parties in Pakistan, to credibly claim the provision of security as a fundamental good based on a law-and-order campaign and thus dominate electoral contexts in areas previously affected by insurgency. The PTI’s more ambiguous electoral successes in other areas, notably the populous province of Punjab, reflected intense competition over patronage and promises of the delivery of development with other parties, notably the PML-N. As a result, Pakistani elections are increasingly being contested as starkly different regional party systems, largely because the goods that are being promised to the population are qualitatively different from one another, and some are more associated with the coercive apparatus of the state and law-and-order politics than others.

Authors

• Adnan Naseemullah, King's College London

• Pradeep Chhibber, University of California, Berkeley