Pathways to Power: Recruitment and Regime Instability in Pakistan (Politics of South Asia)

This book examines the “persistent instability” in Pakistan’s regime addressing how we understand the shifts in the combination of authoritarian and democratic tendencies, and why is it that the regime does not go beyond the threshold of a transitioning democracy.In doing so, it emphasizes the importance of how power is distributed within a regime, by assessing candidate recruitment and selection in Pakistan. The book builds on the structural approaches by K.B.Sayeed (1968), Jalal (1995) and Tudor (2013) on the origins of democracy in Pakistan by questioning why an unstable regime has persisted in Pakistan despite electoral turnover and the entry of new political players.It then goes on to propose that if one treats elite recruitment as the independent variable explaining political regimes, the strategies employed by the elite to access power and perpetuate themselves in power explains why these elite do not have the incentive to move towards democracy, choosing instead a hybrid politi