Political parties are an essential component of democratic systems. Yet, parties frequently engage in violent behavior. They employ violence directly, utilizing their activists and cadres to target political opponents and their supporters. They outsource violent tasks to urban gangs and ethnic militias – street-level violent specialists – who do their violent bidding in exchange for access to state resources and in order to engage in illegal acts without fear of retribution. And they form electoral alliances with elite violence specialists, who maintain local vote banks through the control of microlevel clientelistic structures and the use of coercion. In this book, I offered a theory for why parties engage in violence, where they are more likely to do so, and which violent strategies different parties adopt. I provided evidence from Pakistan using both qualitative and quantitative data to demonstrate that political and economic conditions structure the incentives that parties have to engage in violence or ally with violent actors, in doing so further inhibiting state capacity. I also demonstrated that these patterns are not unique to Pakistan by looking at cases of party violence in Nigeria, the Philippines, and India.
Political parties are principally motivated by a desire to gain power through elections. Indeed, this is what differentiates them from other organizations that wield violence, such as militants, terrorists, criminals, and other nonstate armed actors. Thinking of violence as an electoral strategy – not unlike clientelism or vote-buying – allows us to examine it as a negative electoral inducement, as part and parcel of a “broader bundle of irregularities” (Staniland Reference Staniland2014). A party’s incentives for violence, then, must be viewed through an electoral lens. But my theory differs from other electoral explanations of political violence by arguing that violence does not always in itself directly aid political parties in winning them votes. In some circumstances, such as when parties form electoral alliances with militant groups, the violence is merely a by-product of parties’ vote-getting strategies. In still others, such as when violence is used to capture economic rents, the party may not only secure some benefits but must also weigh countervailing costs that can be imposed by voters.
In this book, I argued that the set of benefits and costs a party faced for violence depended on the nature of the political landscape in which the party competed and its support base, particularly the elasticity of its support. I further examined how a party’s organizational structure influenced its ability to engage not only in violence but also in clientelist and vote-mobilization strategies, and how that, in turn, affected its relationship with local patrons – some of whom were violence specialists – in political landscapes of shared sovereignty. In doing so, I have emphasized that parties have organizational identities that exist beyond their role in elections, something that has been hitherto underemphasized in the literature on parties and violence in the developing world. My argument thus challenges existing explanations which find that the driver of violence is entirely external to the party itself – for example, in the extent of electoral competitiveness in a particular arena or in the role of the military or other aspects of state coercive capacity. Such explanations are unable to account for the subnational and cross-party variation we see in Pakistan. Nor do explanations that rely solely on party characteristics predict that the same party might adopt distinct violence strategies in different arenas, but exactly such variation is observed in Pakistan.
When the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) forms electoral alliances with sectarian militant actors in Punjab, for example, it is not primarily due to ideological similarities or a desire for violence or militancy; rather, this organizationally weak party must rely on local patrons – which in some constituencies are actors linked to sectarian militant groups – for vote mobilization. By contrast, in the ethnically polarized and Hobbesian city of Karachi, I demonstrated that the MQM, ANP, and PPP alike were, for a time being, able to benefit from the coercive and economic potential for violence without losing much support from their captive support base of co-ethnic voters. The ANP did not attempt to replicate this strategy in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, however, where the benefits to violence were relatively muted and where they faced greater costs from their potential vote base. Only by assessing benefits, costs, and organizational capacity for violence can party strategies become explicable.
In this concluding chapter, I explore the implications of my research for the nature and future of democratization in Pakistan and other developing countries. In doing so, I explore the normative implications of my research agenda and explain how highlighting party violence may further complicate the democratizing project in unstable democracies – but is nonetheless important for us to study. I also explore the limits of my argument by exploring avenues for future research on political parties and political violence. What does my focus on party incentives, capacity, and strategy leave out? Finally, I elaborate on the policy implications of my findings.
9.1 Implications of the Book’s Findings
In explaining the circumstances under which democratic actors partake in violence as well as the determinants of individual party strategies, this book advances several literatures in the field of comparative politics. In this section, I explore the implication of this book’s findings on prospects for democratic consolidation, political party development, party–voter linkages, and the effect of democratization on violence.
9.1.1 Prospects for Democratic Consolidation
Is there hope for true democracy in Pakistan? What do the findings of this book tell us about prospects for democratic consolidation in other settings with weak state capacity – and beyond? The use of violence by political parties raises important questions about the efficacy of democratic institutions particularly when underlying illiberal institutions are coopted rather than replaced. Indeed, one important lesson of this book is that the presence of formal democratic procedures does not necessarily signal the end of undemocratic practices but may in fact reinforce them. Politicians and parties face a number of political and economic incentives that militate against them eliminating the perpetrators of violence, both within and outside of the party apparatus.
Pakistani parties have long had to compete on an uneven playing field in their contestation with a powerful military – often even having to convince the public about the viability and desirability of electoral democracy. Elected, civilian, party-led governments have held power from 1988 to 1999 and again from 2008 to the present. The tenures of such governments have been brief – on average about three years – and no party since 1988 has won consecutive national elections.Footnote 1 While no doubt detrimental, employing violent strategies has been one recourse as parties seek to gain power rapidly in order to function more freely. Parties recognize that they have available to them relatively short-term horizons in which to prove themselves and they make decisions based on these expectations. Many of the external actors upon whom parties rely – gangs, ethnic militias, landed elites, and militant groups – may even see their utility increase in the presence of political parties who solicit their help in mobilizing voters, managing clientelistic exchange, and outsourcing violent tasks that the parties either do not have the capacity to engage in themselves or do not want to risk the reputational costs of doing so. While the presence and strength of sectarian organizations in Punjab reflects the weakness of provincial and federal state institutions and the particular incentives of the military, party alliances with these groups can serve to embolden these actors and further weaken the state.
However, the gains to political parties of utilizing violence or allying with violent actors are ultimately short-lived. While parties reap immediate electoral benefits from such partnerships, they may soon find that these arrangements are fluid and that they are unable to control or coerce their erstwhile partners. Particularly as the power of such actors solidifies, they may become direct competitors to weakly organized political parties, and parties may even find themselves at the receiving end of violence. Indeed, without themselves developing local-level networks with their constituents, such parties will always be beholden to nonparty actors who have little to gain from the development of democratic institutions and norms or the consolidation of state capacity.
Similarly, party violence in Karachi may strengthen a party’s political and economic hold of parts of the city in the immediate term, but it increases the likelihood of being at the receiving end of a state crackdown. This was the case with the MQM, who despite nearly three decades of effectively controlling the city, finds itself today a mere shadow of its former self. Democratic consolidation in these circumstances is all the more challenging. Indeed, party violence is detrimental for democratization in part because it delegitimizes democratic actors and gives other actors, such as the military, a reason to intervene within the electoral arena. Party actions offer powerful rhetorical justifications of ‘cleaning up the mess of violence and corruption’ to crack down on party leadership and members. Citizens are provided with more reasons to distrust political parties and civilian institutions, further upsetting the democratic project. As such, voters may opt out of the election process, believing all parties and candidates to be unworthy. As Staniland (Reference Staniland2014, 99–100) writes, then, “the grim intersection of violence and voting is the central challenge to meaningful democratization.”
Doing a deep dive into Pakistan as this book does holds a number of lessons for democratization in similar contexts, but can also speak to the emergence and effect of violence on democratic backsliding in more established settings. Indeed, the presence of nominally democratic actors or norms does not always protect against violence when these actors have the incentive to either promote violence themselves or look the other way in the face of violence by aligned nonstate actors. The turn toward political violence in the United States during Donald Trump’s presidential tenure (2016–20) is indicative of this phenomenon, one that sounded alarm bells about democratic erosion in the country. My account has focused primarily on support bases that are captive due to shared ethnic ties, but polarization in the United States shows how strongly held partisan identities (which often overlap with racial identities) can also alter the incentives that political actors have to incite violence or support violent actors. Graham and Svolik (Reference Graham and Svolik2020) find, for example, that only a minority of American voters are willing to defect from a co-partisan candidate for violating democratic principles when the price of doing so is voting against their own party, and this effect increases with the strength of partisanship. They conclude that “in a sharply polarized electorate, even pro-democratically minded voters may act as partisans first and democrats only second” (392). Where a large number of voters feel that the true number of exit options available to them are limited or that their interests would not be adequately served by any other electorally viable party, they may be more willing to put up with the unsavory acts of their preferred party.
Nonetheless, the picture is not entirely dire and there are some important take-aways that point toward hope for the future in Pakistan. Indeed, as it becomes the norm for parties to complete their time in office, as occurred in 2013 and 2018, organizationally weak parties may perceive that lengthened time horizons permit greater party investments in durable relationships with voters. Even in the less-than-ideal circumstances described in these pages, parties have had to consider the likelihood of voter punishment, as well as reputational concerns from other domestic and international actors, and adjust their tactics accordingly. Indeed, there are abundant signs that parties consciously and continuously consider voter reactions to their moves – a powerful signal of democracy at work. These reputational consequences are likely to increase as nonviolent options become more common – as happened in Karachi with the introduction of the multiethnic PTI. Just because parties have used structural conditions to their advantage – allowing them room to establish their footing – does not suggest that they are destined to follow these strategies forever.
9.1.2 Party–Voter Linkages
This book highlights the circumstances under which party violence will sometimes go unpunished by voters, particularly among those who see no alternative option for political representation. This argument is not intended as an indictment of Pakistani citizens. Rather, voters face real constraints in making these political choices. Reno argues, for example, that militarized electoral politics “turns voters into supplicants to whoever is the strongest local power broker or the politician-protector of their ethnic community, rather than demanding and critical individuals who are actually able to exercise a choice” (2011, 218). However, such a reading also underestimates the agency that voters have, even in such violent settings. Like other contemporary work on the Pakistani voter (see, for example, Khan Mohmand 2019), this book demonstrates that voters are rational actors. As such, violence is not the result of false consciousness, mob frenzy, or uninformed electorates. Rather, Pakistani voters make decisions about how to vote based on the choices in front of them and the reality of violent landscapes in their part of the country. Voters will elect the candidate that they believe is most likely to serve their varied interests and in cases where voters are stuck between two local patrons – both violent but one who directs his violence outwards – it should not be a surprise that they will choose the individual who is more likely to serve their interests and ensure their safety.
We should also be clear that, violence aside, voters have formed deep connections with parties that are not just based on the promise of clientelism or the fear of violent retribution. The relationship between Muhajir voters and the MQM is multifaceted and complex and cannot be reduced to a simple story of coercion or material interests being served. While the promise of clientelistic exchange is certainly a part of the appeal of ethnic parties, as other works contend (Chandra Reference Chandra2004), pride in descriptive representation (Malik Reference Malikn.d.) and the narrative of a shared past are also important factors at play. As demographics continue to change in Karachi, the dynamics between parties and voters will also need to evolve, but it is unlikely that the importance of ethnic ties will be eradicated entirely.
9.1.3 Party Development Amidst Violence
In a sense, this book has painted a grim picture of political party development in many hybrid regime contexts by showcasing how structural conditions interact with the strength of party organizations and voter support to make violence often a desirable party strategy. It has also demonstrated that, in the presence of local strongmen, it is frequently difficult for parties to develop the capacity that they would need to operate independently of these actors. Given these underlying conditions, then, we are left with important questions about whether parties will always be relegated to engaging in undemocratic acts in the pursuit of electoral victory. In other words, are parties stuck in these dynamics – and for how long? What are the possibilities for them to maneuver out?
On the one hand, the book shows that strong organizational structure – something which policy-makers may view as desirable – is not always correlated with less party violence. Simple technocratic solutions that seek to build up party apparatuses without considering other factors – such as the nature of party support bases and the particular political landscape in which a party operates – may then backfire. On the other hand, weak party organizational structure carries with it the risk that parties must rely on local strongmen for electoral success. Indeed, despite the Pakistan People Party’s – and later, the PTI’s – initial promise of developing a robust local party apparatus, the allure of electables and the valuable vote banks that come with them ultimately won out. In many electoral arenas, the power of these traditional strongmen remains strong; in others, urbanization and the salience of new identity cleavages has resulted in the creation of new – sometimes more militant – strongmen. While the replacement of one violent actor by another violent actor is hardly cause for celebration, it does suggest the permeability and malleability of long-standing relations of dependence particularly in the face of continued urbanization and internal migration. Just as new local elites have challenged the power of traditional electables, so too may militant actors find their power challenged in the future. And as the nature of these local actors changes, so too may the party’s relative reliance on them and perhaps even their own organizational structures.
9.1.4 Violence in Developing Democracies
Does democracy make violence more likely? While this was not the motivating question of my book, the overall story presented in these pages is consistent with an inverted U-shape relationship between violence and democracy, with greater amounts of violence occurring in situations of anocracy (see Klopp and Zuern Reference Klopp and Zuern2007). Indeed, while a “well-functioning democracy depends on non-violent politics” (Kleinfeld Reference Kleinfeld2017), the process of democratization is itself often messy and may not always be transitional; indeed, hybrid politics can be a steady state.
This raises a number of critical, normative questions for us. Primarily, while violence should be viewed as ultimately undesirable, the absence of violence does not always signify success if the state is merely neutralizing dissent. The events that unfolded in Karachi after 2013 are an important example of the ways in which these thorny questions can unfold in real life. When I visited the MQM party headquarters in the summer of 2015, the after effects of a recent crackdown by the Pakistani Rangers – a paramilitary force operating under the authority of the federal government but commanded by military officers – were apparent. The operation had ostensibly been carried out to bring the high levels of political and ethnic violence in Karachi under control. The MQM was a natural target. Now, following the Rangers’ operation, some party members were in hiding, with many others maintaining a low profile. Compared to my visit in 2013, only two years prior, there was a visible calm on the streets of this megacity that had long been marred with violence. This earlier visit had been curtailed due to the killing of an MQM party worker in tit-for-tat political violence, which had resulted in a shutdown across the city and numerous cancelled meetings. Now, hotels and guesthouses welcomed visitors again, local residents were willing to travel around the city, and people seemed much less apprehensive. A journalist explained to me that the sense of fear instilled by the MQM among media personnel had also dissipated, allowing them to speak more freely about the party.Footnote 2
There is no doubt that a state should work to curtail the type of extreme violence that had beset Karachi. Targeting and killing members of opposition parties, torturing dissidents, intimidating the press, and targeting the police – none of these acts should be part and parcel of routine democratic politics. However, it remains equally important that political party members be protected from extrajudicial killings and torture by state institutions such as the police, paramilitaries, or intelligence services. My visit to an especially poor MQM constituency brought me face-to-face with individuals commonly thought to be the party “thugs” or muscle, those who carried out the party’s “dirty work” to help with the party’s electoral goals and in order to establish and maintain control. These party workers showed me torture marks on their bodies, which they said had occurred at the hands of government authorities. One told me, “They arrest us when we have done nothing. They torture us so much just because we are members of MQM. I couldn’t walk for 3 months. This has happened with all of us. Hung upside down, told we weren’t Pakistani, we won’t accept you.”Footnote 3
Repeated state crackdowns on the MQM further failed to consider its immense street power and popular support, particularly among the Muhajir community in Karachi. A Karachi-based journalist told me, for example:
I remember when Nine Zero was raided by the Rangers, you should have seen the faces of workers in our office. Some people were happy, but others were like, ‘now who will speak for us?’ They look at it that way, thinking that the Urdu-speaking community would no longer have representation.Footnote 4
In fact, soon after the Rangers’ operation had begun, the MQM won a by-election for a National Assembly seat by a landslide, signaling its continued popularity.
My research topic, thus, falls within a highly contested space. The normative implications of such a research agenda were made clear to me days into my field research. In a country where civilian institutions, including political parties, are widely perceived as inefficient and corrupt – particularly in comparison to the more popular military – many local academics and civil society activists with a vested interest in promoting democracy in Pakistan expressed their fear that shedding light on parties’ involvement in any of the violence afflicting the country would have the – unintended – consequence of giving further power to the military. Additionally, many believed that the “real” culprit was the military, and therefore by focusing on political parties, I was in some way absolving the military of its role. In this reading, political parties play only a secondary role in the violence that we see in the country, and by focusing on them, we are distracting ourselves from the main issue.
I take this criticism seriously. As I have made clear in this book, the military is an important force shaping the parameters within which political parties in Pakistan operate. Which violent actors are patrons – and therefore viable partners for political parties – is at least partly a result of which actors have themselves been patronized by the military in periods when democracy has not prevailed. However, as I have also made clear in this book, the military is hardly omnipotent nor is its role the only side of the story. My desire is certainly not to impede the development of political and civilian institutions in the country by giving undemocratic institutions fodder to employ opportunistically in public debates. I hope, instead, that this book will be read not as an indictment of political parties but as an explanation of the ground-level realities that lead to parties adopting particular strategies. Only in doing so can we offer solutions and pave the way for changes in the future.
9.2 Where Do We Go From Here? Avenues for Future Research
While Pakistan is a substantively important case which should be of interest to policy-makers and academics alike, this research also contributes to a growing literature on violence and democracy in the developing world more broadly. It does so by deliberately focusing on the political party as the primary actor, even while it takes seriously structural conditions – the varied landscapes of state capacity and the violence specialists endemic to those landscapes – that parties have to navigate.
Yet, there are limits to my research and a number of questions remain unanswered, laying out fruitful avenues for future scholarship. One question considers how parties and voters can navigate out of a political and electoral ecosystem that has seen high, enduring levels of violence. Compelling research on the intergenerational legacies of political violence has demonstrated that descendants of individuals who have been exposed to violence are more likely to self-identify as victims and demonstrate greater levels of in-group attachment and more hostile attitudes toward the state (Lupu & Peisakhin Reference Lupu and Peisakhin2017). Future research should continue along these lines and explore further how parties, operating not during civil war but nonetheless amidst violence, can reorient their strategies. After decades of engaging in identity-based violence and utilizing exclusionary rhetoric (or allying with actors that do so), how do parties and voters form new linkages? How does the entry of new groups – such as internal migrants – affect these calculations? This research agenda dovetails with another rich and growing literature on how political parties adapt to include new identity groups as they become a more important part of the electorate (Dancygier Reference Dancygier2017).
Second, this book has highlighted how economic incentives can play a key role in driving party behavior. In Karachi, the informal nature of the economy coupled with a largely absent state guaranteed remuneration for parties competing over valuable turf, and as such, created incentives for party violence. Similarly, I have emphasized the manner in which violence and coercion are often key parts of the patron–client relationship. Finally, like Vaishnav (Reference Vaishnav2017), I underscored the important role played by the financial capabilities of party candidates. Nonetheless, my work does not systematically assess many important questions related to the political economy of violence. Fruitful avenues for future research include the link between the formalization of the economy and violence, how structural changes in the economy can affect the relative costs and benefits parties face in particular landscapes, and how violence in turn can affect the structure of the economy.
Third, this book has focused primarily on a party’s involvement in violence – whether it is involved and how it is involved. In doing so, less attention has been paid to the particular type of violence – for example, whether it is selective or indiscriminate – its timing, or the level of violence. While my findings do have implications for some of these questions, as discussed in these pages, future work should unpack further how the various party strategies outlined in this book affect the timings or levels of violence witnessed. It is possible, for example, that criminal or economic violence affect voter preferences differently than violence aimed at opposition parties or actors.
Finally, while my work focuses primarily on weak state contexts where capacity is shared by multiple actors, it does not speak directly to civil war contexts or, to a large extent, situations of party capture. I have explained how I expect my theory to travel to these different landscapes, but this has not been my focus. Future research should examine how the organizational capacity of parties and their support base interact with incentives for violence in these contexts. Similarly, while my work explains how political parties may have incentives to impede growing state capacity, future work should also look at when and how growing state coercive capacity can escape from the trap of high-violence equilibria, especially if there are identifiable escape routes that do not involve considerable violence in the process.
9.3 Implications for Policy-Making
The relative lack of scholarly focus on party violence in Pakistan – particularly in comparison to work on the military’s relationship to armed groups or the impact of international and regional factors on the growth of Islamic terrorism in the country – has meant that policy responses are incomplete or ineffective. This book’s findings suggest that we have much to gain from shifting our focus toward local-level dynamics and toward parties as organizational actors.
Party violence threatens the democratic project in newly democratizing countries by challenging the core underpinning of democracy: free and fair elections. By intimidating voters, violence can dampen voter turnout. Violence can prevent certain parties from campaigning openly and effectively. And it can target individual politicians, thereby limiting the choices that voters have before them. Importantly, electoral violence also threatens the credibility of elections. It is not uncommon for election results to be challenged in their aftermath by voters dissatisfied that their preferred parties came up short. In many cases, such challenges have resulted in fresh violence being enacted. In other extreme cases, such protests have encouraged military intervention. Whatever steps can be taken to increase the legitimacy of elections would therefore help the overall democratic project. National and international aid organizations, as well as state entities, should focus on preventing intimidation at the polls and other forms of electoral violence. They must also work on enhancing their own credibility to ensure that citizens are willing to believe their assessment of elections as free and fair.
However, as this book has stressed, party violence is sadly much more than electoral violence. Thinking of political violence as merely a law-and-order problem ignores the incentives that mainstream political actors have to engage in such forms of electoral irregularities or to “look the other way” when nonparty violence specialists engage in violence. Technocratic interventions focused only on policing will therefore fail in implementation if such political calculations are ignored. My examination of the conditions under which violence is a strategic tool employed by political parties can help to identify circumstances that promote nonviolent outcomes. I demonstrate that understanding party use of violence and support of violent actors relies on a recognition of the power dynamics of each constituency and the resultant impact on voting behavior. By helping to unpack the strategic logics motivating the use of violence by political parties in certain locales and at certain times, this book allows us to isolate the instances where violence is more likely to occur and generate solutions that make it less attractive to the perpetrators. By focusing on a party’s internal organizational structures, international aid organizations that work with political parties can help to limit the need for parties to rely on violent external brokers. Organizations should encourage the formation of local-level offices for political parties and demonstrate the importance of socializing political cadres and activists to nonviolent outcomes.
Party violence is not merely caused by a few bad actors. As long as the underlying conditions that incentivize the use of violence or the reliance on external violent actors do not change, we should not expect to see a reduction in such violence. Only the slow, hard work of changing those incentives is likely to lead to a more peaceful Pakistan.
