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How Will Parties and Voters Influence the Upcoming Election in Pakistan?
339 Plays1 year ago
In Pakistan, election decisions can be dependent on either the party’s label or the party’s ideology. Currently, Pakistan’s political parties are facing a number of constraints in trying to influence the outcomes of voters’ choice during election time. Dr. Niloufer Siddiqui and Dr. Asad Liaqat discuss these constraints and how the upcoming election outcomes can be influenced by the way parties are structured and the way they interact with voters.
This is a guest episode from the "Let's Talk Development" podcast by CDPR.
Dr. Niloufer Siddiqui is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, University at Albany-State University of New York (SUNY). She is a Nonresident Fellow at the Stimson Center and a Fellow at the Mahbub ul Haq Centre at LUMS. Her research interests include political violence, political behavior, the politics of religion and ethnicity, voters and foreign policy, and the politics of South Asia. Her book manuscript examines why political parties in Pakistan engage in violence or form electoral alliances with violent actors.
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Transcript
Introduction: Pakistan's Upcoming Election
00:00:06
Speaker
Welcome to Unpacking Us. I'm your host, Asad Lyakat. I'm surfacing after a long break to bring you this episode in which I talk to Neelu for Siddiqui on the role that parties and voters will play in the upcoming election in Pakistan.
Borrowed Episode: Let's Talk Development
00:00:23
Speaker
This episode is actually a guest episode from a podcast called Let's Talk Development by the Center for Development and Policy Research in Lahore.
00:00:32
Speaker
This podcast does a great job of covering many different development issues in Pakistan and features a rotating list of hosts and guests, including Gibran Nasser, Mohsin Hamid, Iram Sattar, Adil Najam, Ijaz Nabi, Raffey Alam, Umer Javed, and many others. I strongly encourage you to check out this podcast to get expert takes on different development issues in Pakistan.
Unpacking Us: Technology in the Developing World
00:00:57
Speaker
Also, the focus for my own podcast, Unpacking Us, is shifting a little bit going forward. First of all, the podcast is going to be back. I'm going to start releasing episodes for the second season very soon, which will focus on technology in the developing world more broadly.
00:01:16
Speaker
we'll talk about financial inclusion, education, AI, politics, and many other areas. And as guests, I'll bring builders and doers in addition to the researchers and thinkers who are usually my guests. So watch out for the second season. And for now, let's turn to my conversation with Niloufer Siddiqui on the Let's Talk Development podcast.
Political Dynamics in Pakistan's Election
00:01:40
Speaker
Hello and welcome to this episode of Let's Talk Development by CDPR. I'm Asad Lyakat and I'll be your host today.
00:01:48
Speaker
This episode of Let's Talk Development is about political parties and voters, and how the upcoming election in Pakistan, which is scheduled for early next year, will be shaped by different aspects of how parties are structured, and how they engage with voters, and how voters behave. Our guest today is Dr. Neerofar Siddiqui. She's an assistant professor of political science at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at SUNY Albany.
00:02:16
Speaker
She's also a non-resident fellow at the Stimson Center and a fellow at the Mahabhu Bulhaq Research Center at LAMS. She has studied Pakistani politics and the politics of other countries from so many angles that it's a bit hard to summarize her contribution. Her recent book, Under the Gun, Political Parties and Violence in Pakistan, studies why political parties engage in violence or form alliances with violent actors.
00:02:41
Speaker
She co-edited a volume on the form and function of political parties in Pakistan that I had the good fortune of contributing to. This book is titled France Political Parties Surviving Between Dictatorship and Democracy. And then she has numerous papers in top political science journals on these topics related to political violence and party behavior, as well as on how voter behavior is influenced by factors such as conspiracy theories, misinformation, foreign policy, religion, and ethnicity.
00:03:11
Speaker
We'll touch on many of these topics today.
Constraints on Political Parties in Pakistan
00:03:13
Speaker
Nila, thank you for being here. Thank you so much, Asit. I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
00:03:20
Speaker
Awesome, okay, so let's jump in and let's start with talking about political parties. So there's now a growing volume of work, including a lot of your own work, on the role that political parties play within the constraints that they operate, right? So it's well known that political parties are facing a lot of constraints from external actors and, you know,
00:03:43
Speaker
despite the constraints that they face, they're able to kind of carve a way through which they influence outcomes. So often the arguments in Pakistan that what really matters for politics
00:03:59
Speaker
is either local elites who basically have their own captive voter base. And what really matters is who the person is who's on the ticket and not what the party is. And on the other hand, we often hear the argument that it's actually state institutions at the top who decide which parties are able to compete and which parties have restrictions placed upon them and so aren't able to fairly compete in an action.
00:04:22
Speaker
So when you hit these kinds of arguments, what arguments do you have to say that parties are important actors and parties do influence outcomes in elections?
Adapting to Political Challenges Post-Imran Khan
00:04:33
Speaker
Yeah, so this is a really important point. And something that I think many of us have heard, those of us who study political parties, is something that comes up every time we present our research or just speak generally about the place and role of political parties in Pakistan. And I do think this is with good reason, right? I mean, I don't think anybody would argue that civil-military relations in Pakistan aren't skewed.
00:04:57
Speaker
It's very clear that the military is the most important actor in Pakistan today. I don't think there's really any doubt about this. But I think that one thing that has motivated my own work is the sense that maybe the existing literature, especially that that existed maybe, you know, 10 to 15 years
00:05:15
Speaker
Prior, I think things are changing now, including with your work. But there's, I think this has been taken a little too far, right? With the existing literature focusing so heavily on the military and other institutions, to the extent that parties are kind of seen as largely secondary actors, or those that don't really have a seminal place in Pakistani politics. And I just, I don't think that that is really accurate either.
00:05:42
Speaker
I think that, you know, if parties didn't matter, they wouldn't be dominating the discourse to the extent that they do. I mean, you can't pick up a box on a newspaper or turn on a box on a news channel without hearing the names of all political parties, right? They wouldn't be, you know, people wouldn't care about party labels, but surveys show again and again that parties that voters do care about party labels.
00:06:04
Speaker
individuals join political parties, party candidates, electoral candidates switch between political parties, right? None of these things would happen if parties didn't matter at all. Now, I think the question that we should be asking, right, is really within the constraints that political parties face, of which there are many, how do political parties see their role? How do different political parties act
00:06:28
Speaker
differently depending on these constraints. And really, in a sense, we should think about, I think, the role of the political party vis-a-vis the military as maybe one additional characteristic of the party that voters have in mind when they cast a vote, just as they keep in mind the party's policies or the party's ethnicity or ethnic claims or other party promises for clientelism or patronage and so on.
00:06:54
Speaker
What has happened in the last year or two since the events that started with the vote of no confidence against Imran Khan?
PTI's Impact on Political Landscape
00:07:01
Speaker
The ways in which parties have responded to these things, the ways the parties have evolved, and the changes have been transformational in many ways. What does that say about your argument that the true test of party strength or the role of parties lies in how they respond to external factors?
00:07:23
Speaker
Yeah, I think that, you know, I'm curious to hear your thoughts about this as well, because I think the events of the last two or three years, really since 2018, I guess, have been really critical to the functioning of parties in Pakistan. I don't want to go too far away from the question you posed about the no confidence motion, but I do think it's important for us to just think about how the landscape of Pakistani politics and not just party politics, of politics in general,
00:07:49
Speaker
has changed with the addition of this third party actor in the form of the PTI, right? And so, obviously, box then is a multi party system. There's numerous political parties. But for all intents and purposes, the PMLN and the PPP were alternating federal power, right? So in terms of power at the center.
00:08:09
Speaker
So I do think that this entry in a real way of the PTI was transformative in many ways. And even then when we're talking about 2018, there's this question of to what extent those elections were free and fair. And I think, again, one of those things that you can't really fully argue is that they were entirely free and fair. I think it's pretty clear that political parties were not provided an even playing field in the weeks and months that preceded the election.
00:08:36
Speaker
Even then, however, I think that scholars or other commentators who argue that the elections were entirely rigged are also missing the incredible impact that the PTI had on the voting landscape.
Partisanship and Urbanization in Voter Behavior
00:08:52
Speaker
And I think that we also need
00:08:55
Speaker
to look at that election and think about other changing patterns, so urbanization or the increase in partisanship, the influence of rhetoric, right, and how much that matters. And I think that this is kind of a big shift. I don't think it's a shift that has happened entirely, but if you look at just like, you know, the 1990s and prior, we're really talking about a world in which
00:09:19
Speaker
It seems like, at least from the data and information that's available to us, that voters really cast their vote primarily on the basis of promises of patronage and clientelism. And so their identity of the local elite mattered a lot. And I think absolutely the identity of the local elite still matters a lot in many parts of Pakistan today. But I think that what we've seen is
00:09:42
Speaker
also this shift towards partisanship and party voter linkages mattering in a very different way than they matter just 20 years prior. And I think also the role of discourse and populist rhetoric and even party ideology matters again. And it might only matter to some segments of society and it only might matter in some places in Pakistan, but that doesn't mean it doesn't matter. And I think that the PTI phenomenon has really shown that.
Coalition Building and Electables Strategy
00:10:11
Speaker
Now, that being said, of course, the PTI wasn't able to come to power until it did adopt some of these characteristics of the weekly organized parties, right? So they had to bring on the electables in order to win, right? They couldn't just rely on partisanship and ideology and rhetoric without that. So I'm not trying to say one is more important than the other, just that we need to recognize that there are these two simultaneous trends that are happening. And then the no-confidence motion itself, right? I mean, I think
00:10:40
Speaker
There's so much has been said about this, right? And so the role of the military is very, I think, very clear. But the fact that the parties were able to come together, that they were able to engage in kind of coalition building, wheeling and dealing, and get the votes that they needed, and do so within, you know, ostensibly constitutional way, right, is I think also really
00:11:01
Speaker
important to note. At the end of the day though, we do have a situation once again where a political party did not complete their constitutionally mandated time in office. So while things were different, it is also a continuation of the same things that we saw in the 1990s.
Power Balance: Local Electables vs. Party Influence
00:11:23
Speaker
Yeah, I'll stop there.
00:11:29
Speaker
I think it's fair to say, based on many observations and many reports, that yes, the 2018 election weren't a free and fair election either. And at the same time, competition really mattered in that election, and that there were many races that really determined the outcome of that election, and that were fairly fought. I remember doing research in Lahore at that time, working with political workers, some of whom were not able to participate in the research because they were being pressured in various ways to not be politically active at that time.
00:11:59
Speaker
And we see kind of a version of the same pressure, except on a different side in this election. So it is true that.
00:12:09
Speaker
those constraints have existed before. So this is not a discontinuous break from the past. And at the same time that there is ample space for competition and for parties to kind of stamp their own unique kind of identity onto whoever comes to their fault. And we have seen that the PTI has behaved in many ways very differently from what came before. And in other ways, it has had to kind of
00:12:39
Speaker
low into the system. And so, for instance, in my native district of Chukwal, in 2018, there was a PMLN politician who won from my
00:12:51
Speaker
from my native constituency. But in 2023, that same politician switched to the PTI and won easily. And there was definitely a segment of his vote base that was capped in the way that we think of traditionally, but there were also many voters that would not have voted for that guy if he did not switch to PTI because these were ideological PTI voters.
00:13:11
Speaker
So, you know, someone I spoke with during my field research, he was an MNA at the time, he explained, you know, I was asking him generally about how voters vote and how parties decide who to give a party ticket to. And he said, you know, you look at the constituency and you look how much percent of this, the vote here is a party vote and how much of it is the independent vote. And he's like, if the places has a 40 to 50% party vote, you can go with maybe a less popular independent act
00:13:40
Speaker
right so the local electable, where it has a 70 to 80% vote that's based on the person's personality, you give that party to get to the local elite right whoever that happens to be. And I think it was just, it was explained so simply but it made so much intuitive sense right that there is this, each constituency has different dynamics.
00:13:58
Speaker
dynamics are between in effect what is the control of the local electable and what is his influence and what is the appeal of the political party right and I think the thing that and I'm curious if you agree but it seems like what's happening since 2018 and the year slightly prior
00:14:15
Speaker
with the emergence of the PTI, is the relative shift of the party vote versus the local electable vote is starting to see bigger and bigger shifts in some constituencies, right? So particularly in those urbanizing constituencies, I think you're starting to see that more and more of this is the party vote. And in some areas, we're still seeing a very large percentage of the vote being the electable vote.
00:14:40
Speaker
I think, yeah, I would agree with you that it's definitely more prevalent in urban areas, but at the same time urbanization is happening really fast. And so areas that were kind of very clearly rural 10, 15 years ago are now very urban. There's a lot more kind of traveling immigration to nearby cities. There's a lot more education. There's a lot more social media. And so all of these trends, I think make the spread of ideology faster.
00:15:10
Speaker
make traditional ties a little bit weaker sometimes. And so the trend that you're describing kind of does resonate. There is also the fact of kind of a population that's becoming much younger on average. And so these younger voters may not kind of agree with the traditional ways in which their forefathers related to local elites, perhaps.
00:15:31
Speaker
I want to make a little segue into thinking about a feature of political parties that arguably receives a little bit less attention in Punjab.
Political Violence and Sectarian Alliances
00:15:42
Speaker
For instance, in my research, I did not encounter that as a prominent feature of political parties, so that's why I'm particularly fascinated by your book. I want to hear your thoughts on
00:15:56
Speaker
When you talk about political violence and you have the book about why political parties engage in violence and kind of why the formal alliances with, even when we don't explicitly think of political parties engaging in violence, they do have local alliances you show with actors that may be violent. So even the major political parties kind of engage in this sort of behavior
00:16:19
Speaker
So for people who may not think of political parties as kind of violent actors, can you describe what you mean by political violence? What are the various forms of political violence? And why is it important to think about political violence as we think about an election?
00:16:38
Speaker
So, you're right that I think when we think about political violence and we're thinking maybe about box on maybe the first thing that comes to our mind is places like Karachi right so where for nearly three decades we had very high levels of political violence also ethnic violence and this was perhaps
00:16:56
Speaker
predominantly associated with them with the head economy movement or the mqm which is a majority manager political party. And so during this time the mqm, as I described in my book, and lots of other scholars, a long guy or his work on Karachi as well describes this phenomenon of
00:17:14
Speaker
you know, basically what I call direct party violence, so where the political party engages in violence directly through its own party cadres and party members. The MQM, there's a lot of evidence to show that, you know, for large parts of the 90s, moving into the 2000s, you know, it had this kind of dedicated military wing in the party, which
00:17:33
Speaker
engaged in extortion, which was often violent, but also various targeted killings and intimidation of police officials, journalists, even members of other political parties and other ethnic groups.
00:17:50
Speaker
And I think that kind of is what maybe perhaps we think about the most when we think about party violence in Pakistan. But in my book, I conceive of violence more broadly. And so I do I think of three different possible violent strategies that political parties can engage in. The first is the one that I described, which I call direct party violence. The second is what I call outsourcing.
00:18:10
Speaker
And so here, the party will delegate the task of violence to a third actor. And so this might be a criminal gang or an ethnic militia. And one of the examples that we see in Karachi is the relationship between the PPP and the People's Amen Committee for a period of time. And so we had, once again, the PPP, like the MQM and other political parties in Karachi, used this ethnic militia
00:18:36
Speaker
to intimidate opponents, to engage in extortion on its behalf, and to sometimes even use violence as a way to make salient the ethnic identity, right, because Karachi was very much divided into these. Karachi was very much voting along ethnic lines at this time.
00:18:55
Speaker
And then the third phenomenon, which I think is more salient or relevant for Punjab, is what I call alliance formation with violent specialists. And so this is distinct from violent outsourcing because the political party is not delegating the task of violence, but rather it is merely allying with an actor who is otherwise violent. And so here the party might not benefit from the violence at all. In fact, the violence may be a cost that the party has here, but for purposes of vote gain, it feels like it needs to
00:19:24
Speaker
ally with this militant actor. And I think the example that most exemplifies this is the relationship that some political parties have had to anti Shia sectarian groups in the country and so this we see in Sindh and then we also see in Punjab, particularly South Punjab.
00:19:43
Speaker
But elsewhere as well, so you may remember as well before the 2013 election, before the 2008 election, also before the 2018 election, but to a lesser degree, there were all these news stories that would be released in the months prior where there was these different individuals who were affiliated with the band, ASWJ, formerly known as Sabaya Sahaba, and other such organizations or groups.
00:20:10
Speaker
And so we saw that these individuals were being given tickets by political parties for on which to contest elections, or we saw this very famous photo that circulated around us and now a lot with. Malala be on via the s wj right campaigning together, and so all these questions arose about like what is happening and why are these parties being seen as like allying with.
00:20:30
Speaker
or giving party tickets to or trying to get the support of these actors. And so this was a puzzle that makes up one chapter of my book, which is to try and understand these parties which are not themselves anti Shia, right? They're not really looking to alienate the Shia vote bank. So what gain
00:20:49
Speaker
are they getting from these sorts of alliances? And this actually does, I think, tie back to the conversation we're having in the prior question, which is that I find that in many ways, these sectarian actors or local clerics or whatever you want to call them, violent specialists, they were at the local level replacing
00:21:12
Speaker
the historic local elite, which was the feudal actor or the peer or somebody else, right? And they were able to gain local influence. And this was for a number of reasons, right? So obviously we have regional factors, the proxy war between Iran and Saudi bringing a lot of money into the madrasas, all sorts of other factors. So these individuals were gaining a lot of local influence, right? So there's a lot of reports of these madrasas flourishing, having a lot of money suddenly.
00:21:38
Speaker
And they were able to start providing for the local residents in a way that once only the feudal were able to provide for. And they also have this added benefit, especially again in urbanizing areas, where they were able to say that, you know, for a long time the feudal elites have kept you down, and there are other linkages as well are hierarchical.
00:21:58
Speaker
And so Islam doesn't believe in any of these things. And so we're providing you a more egalitarian option, right? And so you had a replacement of the old local elite with a new local elite.
00:22:09
Speaker
But this local elite and the feudalist to I conceive of as in some to some extent and in some places as violence specialists right so many of them, especially in sin, known to have their own private militias, often the police is in basically in their control they have some private jails right. So, so the same, I think, in many ways, it's a very similar phenomenon. So the political parties.
00:22:31
Speaker
parties that I conceive of as organizationally weak, who don't have the political party presence in these local areas, to be able to win elections without the support of the local elites need to turn to the local actor, be that actor, feudal or sectarian in order to win the vote of that particular area.
00:22:51
Speaker
And so we see these alliances happening. They're obviously often short-lived. They're often just pre-electoral. And then for the purposes of winning the ticket, they're not really ideological at some strong fundamental level. But they do have these repercussions of increasing the influence of these groups or cementing them within the political process. So I guess that's starting from direct party violence to outsourcing to alliance formation.
00:23:17
Speaker
is how I see, is how I conceive of violence more broadly.
Competition and Engagement in Punjab
00:23:22
Speaker
So it's not just electoral violence, but political violence and party violence more broadly. I want to segue now to thinking about how parties engage with voters and kind of how that
00:23:32
Speaker
ends up influencing not just electoral outcomes, but what are kind of outcomes in general. And here I want to bring in kind of actors and political parties that are not at the senior leadership level, right? And so, you know, when we talk about parties, mostly we think about what is the senior leadership, right? Or who are these kind of electables that kind of are given tickets to kind of fight in
00:23:55
Speaker
In kind of national or provincial elections, but parties are also composed of these thousands of ground level political workers brokers who do the actual work of mobilizing borders and then kind of in the in the intervening periods between elections kind of contacting them and kind of making sure that.
00:24:14
Speaker
They're kind of still loyal that they're, you know, that that what come next election they will be waiting for them. So these actors are kind of really acting as intermediaries of brokers between the senior level politicians and voters. And it's in this space that that some of my work speaks to
00:24:32
Speaker
kind of many reasons for optimism about the political process, right? So a couple of quick examples are in work with Ali Shima and Shannana, a moment I find that in areas where there are more political workers belonging to more different parties, there end up being higher levels of improvements for service delivery.
00:24:52
Speaker
So this is where there's dense competition, even in the presence of all of these forces at the macro level that we've talked about, if there are more political workers at the ground level, there'll be more service delivery improvements. And so that speaks to party voter linkages being strong, irrespective of anything that's going on at the macro level.
00:25:11
Speaker
things will end up being better for people. And these are also, most of these people have been trained to be these local politicians or workers in kind of fairly repressive military regimes, right? So a lot of these became local politicians when Musharraf introduced the local government system in 2002. And then there's also findings that when local politicians become more aware of what people in their constituency care about, then their behavior starts shifting in response. So these local actors are also very responsive.
00:25:42
Speaker
Now, this is a story that kind of says that like party voter linkages really matter a lot, and parties are responsive that parties are these kind of, you know, actors that are working that part of their calculus of winning elections includes doing what people want.
00:25:58
Speaker
I want to caveat that these are all kind of findings from Punjab, which in many ways is arguably kind of the poster child of political competition in Pakistan and where too much attention goes. And so I want to ask you, given this kind of context, how do you think
00:26:18
Speaker
local kind of linkages between parties and voters operate in other parts of the country where you have done work, where you have more insight on whether local competition or whether local engagement between parties and voters ends up being beneficial for people.
00:26:33
Speaker
Yeah, so firstly, I should say that your description of your research, I think, also highlights a lot the first question you posed to me, which is why parties are important. And I think that this in particular kind of gets lost in the discussion. And my work also is kind of more, it doesn't really unpack so much this kind of middle level that you were talking about. And so I think it's incredibly important.
00:26:58
Speaker
Excuse me, I don't know if I have great answers to your question about like how this varies from Punjab to Sindh and other parts of the country, KP. I think that I've done some survey work that includes other provinces besides Punjab. And I think there are some differences that I have found quite interesting just in terms of
00:27:21
Speaker
trying to understand what aspect of an electoral candidate is appealing to a voter in these different provinces. I do think, though, in a way, I believe that the bigger cleavage is in so much provincial differences as much as urban rural differences. And so I think that what we're seeing when we find differences between provinces is really maybe a function of how rural that province is.
00:27:44
Speaker
And that, I think, matters in part because the traditional power holders or stakeholders are different in each of these provinces, again, based on the rule, urban split. The only exception, I think, is in Balochistan, which does not, I don't focus on Balochistan in my work because that is where, I think, democracy
00:28:06
Speaker
is least present in our country. And so the ability of parties to function independently there, I think, is really suspect. So maybe I would say Balochistan probably have the least good information and probably has the most idiosyncratic factors at play. But otherwise, I think my guess is that urban rule kind of overrules provincial differences.
00:28:27
Speaker
So I think we've started talking about like how people decide who to vote for in many ways and what are the factors that kind of underlie that and that I think I want to sketch out for our listeners kind of how
Factors Influencing Vote Choice in Pakistan
00:28:42
Speaker
political scientists traditionally thought about this question. And many of the factors that we have been discussing kind of show how Pakistan kind of is a different case and many kind of developing democracies are a different case of that. So I guess traditionally when political scientists thought of vote choice and in kind of this paradigm of kind of rational choice where like people do what's rationally best for them, that
00:29:09
Speaker
kind of view, put forward this idea that the main things that voters are looking for is performance of some kind. So they have some expectations when they're looking forward about the different potential candidates, how they will perform on some kind of dimensions. And they use past performance as a guide to tell them which politicians will perform in a certain way.
00:29:35
Speaker
what kind of performance that could be, you know, something programmatic, like building roads, providing education, providing health care, or it could be clientelistic, as you as we've been talking about this kind of local collectibles, they engage in this clientelistic behavior. And, you know, your work has shown and other work has shown that there is a prime role that ethnicity or identity can also play. And, you know, that also plays out in many other, I guess, any democracy, really.
00:30:03
Speaker
And so I guess to close things off there, do you think that there's kind of like any major factors that we haven't discussed that kind of play a big role in vote choice for the Pakistani voter?
00:30:16
Speaker
Yeah, no, I'm actually really glad you raised this because one thing I should have mentioned earlier is we haven't really discussed the role of the economy. And I do think actually that this was a very central factor in the even the months just prior to the no confidence vote. Because if you look at the data and I actually think I kind of coincidentally had data on partisan support because for another survey I was doing in January of the year of the no confidence vote. So just three months prior.
00:30:45
Speaker
And I also had survey data the year prior, right? So the year prior we had, and if I recall correctly, this was nationally representative, and we had an overall PTI was maybe leading PMLN by 10 percentage points in my sample, right? So obviously it was a small sample. I don't want to say this was like what an election would have looked like. So all those caveats.
00:31:06
Speaker
But PETI was above PML and particularly in Punjab, but nationally as well. And then a year later, so just in January, so three months before the no confidence vote, we had my survey showed now that the PMLN was leading the PETI by a sizable percentage rate. And this was measured by who do you think you would vote for in the next election or something like that.
00:31:30
Speaker
And I think that that is both striking that like there was such a big shift in one ear, but also kind of not at all striking because the economy was doing terribly right at this time. And so we would absolutely expect that people would see this bad economy and then they would, they would say, Oh no, the PTI is not working for us no matter how much we like this person's ideology or like the charisma of Iman Khan or so on.
00:31:54
Speaker
And, you know, I, who knows what would have happened if the no contest emotion hadn't happened but my I would. It's easy to say now because nobody can prove me wrong but I would have predicted that PTI would have lost and elections had been held freely and fairly. You know, in that year. And now you look and just.
00:32:16
Speaker
Again, it's going to be hard to tell what happens because it's very unlikely we're going to have a completely free and fair election. But the support that we are seeing for the PTI right now, I think at least partly has to do with now voters placing the blame for the economy back on the PDM or the PML and specifically, but all the parties involved in this coalition.
Economic Conditions and Party Support
00:32:42
Speaker
I do think absolutely the economy matters. And I do think that kind of very traditional political science concepts of like, you know, you're going to place the blame on the incumbent and all of those things do apply in this context as well. And we shouldn't be, I think, surprised about that. The other thing about, you know, you raise about identity and ethnicity. I think this is, you know, it's a really good point. It's, it's certainly like very important or
00:33:07
Speaker
was very important in Karachi, still remains likely very important in Karachi, but things again have changed since 2018, is of course that you know, ethnicity can be salient. The only thing that I would add, which I don't think makes Boxland different from other contexts, but I think was still striking to me when I was doing my research, is that
00:33:28
Speaker
ethnicity and identity more broadly is very situational and contextual, which again seems like maybe an obvious point, but I was struck by how much being Pashtun mattered in Karachi versus in KP, right? Because as a minority member of a multi-ethnic city like Karachi where ethnicity is salient,
00:33:49
Speaker
your vote is going to have a different effect than as a member of a majority Pashtun context like KP where all the candidates are Pashtun, right? And so I do think that this sense of the same political party, like the A&P when it was working in KP and when it was in Karachi as well, would be making very different types of appeals to its constituents. Even though it was obviously, it's a Pashtun party, like an explicitly Pashtun party,
00:34:18
Speaker
The work that Bing Pashtun was doing in KP for the ANP was very different than the work that Bing Pashtun was doing for the ANP in Karachi during this time.
00:34:30
Speaker
That's a very interesting point. And I think that's a point that many in Punjab don't quite understand because Punjab is kind of far more ethnically homogenous compared to Lahore, for instance, is very ethnically homogenous compared to Karachi. And so people sometimes don't understand kind of why identity may matter in elections because no such cleavage kind of on a basis of ethnicity exists at that level in Lahore.
00:34:56
Speaker
I thought it was very interesting that you when you were talking about the role of the economy, you were talking about how voters may kind of attribute the blame for for kind of the recent economic downturn on the on the PDM or the PMLN as opposed to the PDI and I think that speaks to like start speaking to this notion that you know voters don't always
Misinformation and Political Discourse
00:35:18
Speaker
know who to blame and don't always know sometimes even what the facts are and in kind of the current climate of the very high penetration of social media and the ability to spread news or fake news very quickly, that that kind of might be taking voters away from this kind of like high information or like good information environment, right? And you've studied this kind of phenomenon of misinformation and conspiracy theories.
00:35:48
Speaker
Can you tell us about the kind of misinformation that's out there in the political space in Pakistan and how parties can use it and do you think that may end up influencing elections?
00:36:00
Speaker
I've been fascinated by conspiracy theories in Pakistan for a long time, right? And I think it is just objectively so interesting, in part because I think that we are unable, as a society or as a country or as like political leaders or whatever, as voters, to really come to an agreement on something
00:36:21
Speaker
not because we have necessarily different views of that outcome, but just because we can't agree on the same facts, right? And that is just so striking because if we just could decide what the facts were about a particular story or whatever, we might actually find that there is agreement on the outcome.
00:36:40
Speaker
So I do think that misinformation, oddly speaking, false information is just is really a very important part of the political landscape. And so we find everything even before, you know, social media really took off. There was, you know, lots of talk about conspiracies in Pakistan.
00:37:01
Speaker
My early work that I did as a graduate student was looking at what happens when political parties endorse a particular conspiracy and whether that moves, whether voters believe that conspiracy or not.
00:37:17
Speaker
And there's a lot of work in American politics to suggest that, yes, they would be moved because partisanship is so strong in Pakistan. But I think when I conducted the survey, which was almost 10 years ago at this point, I don't think it was very clear because partisanship in Pakistan was, especially then, but even today, less strong than it is in the US. But I did find that party endorsement of conspiracies did move
00:37:42
Speaker
So when their party endorsed a conspiracy and made their voters more likely to vote to believe that conspiracy. I also found that baseline belief in conspiracies is very high, but the the party found finding really kind of
00:37:56
Speaker
suggest to me that parties are able to kind of move people to their viewpoint by endorsing or engaging in this space. And we definitely talk a lot about the PTI specifically when it comes to misinformation. In fact, the survey, which again I did a long time ago at the time,
00:38:14
Speaker
PTI voters were the most likely of any other voters to believe conspiracy theories across all treatment groups, right? So this was a finding even then. But I think it's in a way really Imran Khan has occupied, not just in misinformation, but just in general rhetoric and discourse has been his space, right? We don't see other leaders coming out in the same way to engage this narrative war with him.
00:38:40
Speaker
And so in many ways it is, I think, because he is kind of functioning like a populist leader in many ways. So he is able, I think, to both engage in misinformation, but also cast doubts on
00:38:57
Speaker
on official narratives, right? So we saw this a lot in the days after the no confidence motion with this question of what exactly was the US's role. Gallup-Boxin had done some polling to see how much people believed that the US was involved and it increased maybe double digits in terms over the few months just from, it seemed to be just from Iman Khan's narrative alone, right?
00:39:19
Speaker
And so, but I think what also does very effectively, and this is maybe adjacent to misinformation, but a little bit separate is he's able to create this kind of very neat narrative about the economy. And the corruption of these parties, right? And so this is his anti corruption narrative.
00:39:37
Speaker
is anti status co narrative kind of is able to very nicely fit into box on the economy being bad because there's a simple solution you get rid of the corrupt leaders. And your economy will be fixed right and so this I think has helped him.
00:39:53
Speaker
be able to kind of shed the blame of the economy from himself. And you said, you know, like, voters don't really know who to place blame on. I mean, the reality is, like, I don't always understand the nuances of the economy. Right. So and I actually, you know, mostly study this stuff. And so if I don't really know what's happening and things are changing so quickly and it's over the course of many years, we can't expect voters to rate the average voter. And so really, it's the person that's winning this narrative war, I think,
00:40:21
Speaker
that is able to also win control over who's to blame for the economy.
00:40:27
Speaker
Yeah, that's very insightful because I think, you know, my question was, you know, I was trying to get more narrowly at misinformation, but I think you very rightly broadened that up to how politicians form narratives. And, you know, misinformation may play a role within that narrative, but I think it may be more plausible if it fits coherently within a broader narrative that has kind of bits and pieces of truth in there as well that kind of resonate with voters. And I think, I mean, it is an open question for me whether,
00:40:57
Speaker
what these kinds of narratives do is strengthen party support among existing supporters or switch voters away. Because we also see in the US, but also in Pakistan on some of these, let's say beliefs about corruption, you see extremely partisan views. For instance, PTI voters will think that by far the biggest problem in Pakistan is corruption. This is, I guess, true maybe a couple of years ago right now. I think everybody thinks the biggest problem is the economy. But they still are more likely to believe that
Nationalism and Minority Representation
00:41:26
Speaker
Corruption is a big problem, whereas people who don't support PDI will not believe the corruption is a big problem. Right. So there is a there is a sense in which, like, narratives help strengthen support as opposed to switching support sometimes. But obviously, they're always going to people on the margin, young people who are kind of become politically aware. And so.
00:41:46
Speaker
know, these kind of political narratives embedded with a little bit of misinformation here and there may end up kind of influencing how people vote. I guess towards the end of our conversation, I want to talk about kind of this broad problem of
00:42:06
Speaker
inclusion and tolerance in the political space. And in particular, I wanted to talk about some research that you have done that may provide a silver lining with caveats. And so I guess the context here is, for all of our listeners, it's no surprise that in the political space or generally in society, differing from the majoritarian point of view in Pakistan comes with a lot of costs. These costs may be kind of
00:42:35
Speaker
marginalization or they may be active persecution and sometimes even violence, right? So we have a brand of nationalism that's very Punjab-centric, Sunni-centric, male-centric, and is kind of heavily policed in many ways by powerful state institutions and is kind of frequently exploited by many groups as well. And so what we end up with is kind of a sharp sectarian divide. We have kind of problems with accepting other religions. We have problems with
00:43:05
Speaker
We have had active persecution of Amadeus in the country. In one of your papers, you find evidence that having a notion of a national identity that's strong can actually be useful in making people who are followers of that national identity feel more tolerant of minorities. Can you tell us a little bit about that paper and whether I'm right in thinking that there is silver lining here?
00:43:32
Speaker
Yeah, I think a silver aligning with caveats is exactly the way to put it. So yeah, so in this paper, again, it was a survey that we conducted and we found that highlighting the national contributions of a minority. And in this case, we looked at the contributions of the salaam by bringing, you know, national honor to box on through this
00:43:55
Speaker
Nobel Prize for Physics, whether that could increase support or tolerance of Ahmadis, given that his identity was as an Ahmadi, right? And we found that it did, right? There was variation across region, and we found the effect was strongest in Punjab. But overall, we found that there was this effect.
00:44:20
Speaker
And so this is a part of a broader literature known as like the superordinate identity model or this idea of you can if you prime a shared national identity and identity to which you and the minority and the out group belong, then you can
00:44:35
Speaker
make people reconceive themselves, not as distinct on whatever the identity is that makes someone an in-group or out-group, but to make both of them think of themselves as the shared group, right? It's in this case, making everybody think of themselves and Ahmadis as both Pakistani helped increase tolerance towards Ahmadis.
00:44:54
Speaker
So I do think that this is, in many ways, a silver lining. But in work that I'm currently working on with Aswan Mir, we have continued this examination or exploration of the effects of nationalism on various downstream outcomes. And so one paper that we're working on right now finds that nationalism, even nationalism that's cohesive, so this idea that different
00:45:24
Speaker
ethnic or linguistic or religious or sectarian minorities can all work together and for a better Pakistan. So even nationalism like that, right, that is meant to increase the idea of minorities and majority groups working together for Pakistan. That can increase belief that right seeking minority groups are
00:45:47
Speaker
subversives right so and by this I mean we we have a lot of examples in Pakistan unfortunately of groups like Aurathmarch, like the PTM, Pashtun Thafiz movement and so on even many Baloch groups as well who are seen as being supported by foreign agents if they are demanding more rights right so every year Aurathmarch when it's like getting out there to demand more rights for women
00:46:09
Speaker
is accused of having a foreign agenda, of being a foreign plant, of getting money from India or the US or wherever, same with the PTM and others. And so we had expected that a cohesive form of nationalism would decrease these sorts of beliefs. We thought we would be able to say, look like everybody's, we're all brothers and sisters in this land, we do so well together. But I think what we
00:46:35
Speaker
found with follow-up focus groups and follow-up work is that actually this might work great. Nationalism works great if you are a good minority, right? If you are a minority who's bringing
00:46:45
Speaker
positive attention to the country. But as soon as you're doing something that is bringing negative attention to the country by, for example, bringing attention to the problems of women's rights in Pakistan, or the problems that particular ethnic minorities face in Pakistan, then you are cast as the bad minority, right? And then you are seen and that increases
00:47:06
Speaker
intolerance and these beliefs that these groups are supported by foreign powers. Another example, of course, I think is Malala, right? It's kind of stark and fascinating, right? Because in some ways she's bringing a lot of national attention to the country that we can think of as positive because she's a Pakistani who won all these awards. On the other hand, I think many people believe that she's highlighting the social ills of the country, right? And so she's bringing kind of dishonor to the country. She's contesting the status of Pakistan at the international level.
00:47:34
Speaker
And so this is really making me less optimistic about nationalism as a way to increase tolerance of minorities. Yeah, one thing I'm hearing in your response is that if the access along which you're marginalized, if that kind of conflicts with nationalism and you're not, you're kind of, you know, if by expressing your identity, you
00:48:01
Speaker
have to in many ways express that grievance and that it is often a political choice and sometimes it's unavoidable and it definitely should be kind of a right. When that conflicts with national identity then
00:48:22
Speaker
the kind of the system works against you often in a very drastic ways. And so yeah, that, I agree, does not leave that much room for a silver lining. It's very much kind of this kind of trope of like the model minority. If you can play along with the rules, then you may be rewarded. And I think we kind of see this a little bit with the way women are included or not included in politics, right? So like when, you know, for instance, the Auroth March is kind of,
00:48:50
Speaker
actively persecuted or vilified in many ways. But when women are happy to go along with either the family members who are in politics or not make too much noise in politics, then they are sometimes given tickets. And sometimes they do become politicians. But it's hard to find examples of women who are truly pursuing a feminist agenda that goes against majoritarian views of how the country should be run. And then they actually get support.
00:49:22
Speaker
Dito, thank you so much for being here. This was such an exciting conversation. We're going to end, but not before I ask you this final question. Who's going to win the election? Oh, gosh. I mean, who's even going to contest the election? I think is the first question, right? Who's going to be allowed to contest? I'm going to put my money on the PML end. What about you? I think I don't know.
00:49:48
Speaker
You have to choose somebody now. I'm going to punt. I think, you know, yeah, it'll be hard. It'll be hard for the PML not to be in the winning alliance, given how things are. Thank you so much, Nilo, for this has been a pleasure. Thank you, Asad.
Listener Feedback and Future Topics
00:50:15
Speaker
I'd love to hear what you thought about this episode. Please leave a rating and a review on Google Podcasts, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening. This really helps the podcast reach the right audience. You can also email me at asadyakut at gmail.com with any feedback or any ideas you have for topics to cover or guests to invite.
00:50:41
Speaker
Hearing from people who are listening is a large part of what motivates me to record more episodes. So please don't hesitate to write. And thank you for listening.