Book Project
Staffing the State: Bureaucratic Politics and Patronage in Pakistan’s Hybrid Regime
Synopsis: This book provides an explanation of the use of patronage based bureaucratic appointments to regulate politics, service delivery, and governance in Pakistan’s hybrid regime. In a tutelary hybrid regime with uncertain forms of governance, weak rule of law, and political parties and politicians grappling with short-term horizons, how do politicians and bureaucrats improve their access to state resources and direct public goods to favoured constituencies? And what are the regime implications of their actions? I contribute to the literature on bureaucratic politics in hybrid regimes by developing a theory of the use of civil service appointments as a means of achieving political (but not just electoral) outcomes. Control over politicised bureaucratic appointments allows politicians and bureaucrats to counter regime uncertainty by first, regulating access to state resources and the distribution of patronage amongst members of the ruling party itself, coalition partners and members of the opposition, and bureaucrats at various levels of the hierarchy, and second, by directing bureaucratic performance, state capacity, and service delivery in particular directions. These processes allow elites to manage the impacts of hybrid regime uncertainty while, at the same time, entrenching arbitrary patterns of governance that hinder democratic transition and leave the door open for continuing military interventions.
Specifically, politicians and bureaucrats develop mutually beneficial relationships of patronage to carve out space for themselves to achieve their official, electoral, and personal goals when operating within a system prone to military interference and constitutional engineering, especially during periods of democratic transition when political and bureaucratic elites are allowed more room to manoeuvre. In other words, hybrid regime dynamics shape the purposes for which patronage is used and the extent to which it succeeds for both politicians and bureaucrats. Success in achieving outcomes sought by manipulating bureaucratic appointments is a function of two factors: modes of curating strategic and purposive patronage relationships, and the match between outcome sought and how an appointment is made. Though these appointment practices maximise short term gains for some politicians and bureaucrats, I argue that in the long term they serve only to undermine political parties and the bureaucracy, and further entrench the hybrid regime.
In this book, I focus on a period of (failed) democratic transition in Pakistan’s tutelary hybrid regime marked by ruling parties working with select bureaucrats to maximise their gains in the potentially short window of time available to them to access state resources. But the book’s argument about politicised bureaucratic appointments as a mechanism of governance has implications for contexts beyond Pakistan, for both hybrid regime persistence and for debates on backsliding in other weakly institutionalised or even established democracies. Bureaucratic appointments made on the basis of patronage entrench arbitrariness by centralising and personalising power, blurring the boundaries between the political and the bureaucratic, and signalling rather than committing to performance and capacity amongst both political and bureaucratic organisations. In sum, this book contends that investigating bureaucratic politics is revelatory not only of variations in capacity but of wider trends with regard to changes within regimes, hybrid or otherwise.
Ongoing Projects
Minoritisation, Community, and Attitudes toward Immunization: A Survey Experiment in Pakistan, with Dr Rabia Malik (University of Essex). British Academy Small Grant, 2021-2022.
Women in Public Service in Pakistan Oral History Archive Project, with Dr Sana Haroon (UMass) and Dr Saba Pirzadeh (LUMS).