Description

Pakistan’s long and circuitous route to democracy has been explained repeatedly as the result of an intrusive military-bureaucratic state; the failure to develop a constitution until 1958, almost nine years after independence; and weak political institutions. However, few attempts have been made to explain the difficulties of democratic transition by studying key political institutions that in the West have been critical to the process of democratization such as the political parties and legislature. This paper attempts to understand the role played by political parties in Pakistan’s political system by examining methods of candidate selection for legislative office of the 5 main parliamentary parties- a process that differs from party to party and is influenced by the electoral system and prevalent political culture. I will reflect on the significance of candidate selection for the process by which a party is reproduced in public office and the implications of this process on the legislative performance and the nature of democracy in Pakistan.

Mariam is a doctoral candidate in political science at Johns Hopkins University and a visiting Scholar at the Centre for South Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. Over the last two years, she has taught courses in comparative politics at Lahore University of Management Sciences and on the American presidency at JHU. She is currently working on her doctoral dissertation which seeks to fill a major gap in the literature on Pakistani politics by examining in detail the “party system” and its relationship with the state elite, that is: the formal and informal norms that guide the ways in which parties operate and interact with each other, and with the state