Description

This paper attempts to provide a theory for the continuous oscillation between authoritarian and democratic tendencies in a hybrid political regime by examining the regime for what it is instead of treating it as a diminished form of democracy or a prolonged democratic transition. The normative concern driving the scholarly discussion of hybrid regimes is to understand the failure of democracy. Explanations have focused on non-democratic elements of the political system instead of examining key political institutions that in the West have been critical to the process of democratization such as the political parties, elections and legislatures. I contribute a voluntarist explanation of regime change by studying Pakistan- a case in which fragmentation of political power among the ruling classes has endured since the country’s inception, creating a kind of ‘persistent instability’. This may sound oxymoronic but I argue that to understand political regimes that have remained locked in their hybrid state yet have been unstable due to the presence of both authoritarian and democratic tendencies, we need a concept of regime change that can address lasting instability. The empirical study from which I draw my conclusions investigates the role of the military and political parties in the processes of recruitment and selection of the political elite, using the recruitment process as a window into regime dynamics.

Bio:
Mariam Mufti is 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 Carleton University, Lahore University of Management Sciences and Johns Hopkins University. She has co-authored, in 2008, a USAID assessment of Democracy and Governance in Pakistan and published articles in the South Asia Journal, Critique Internationale and SAMAJ.