Much of the literature on politics in Pakistan starts with the assumption that the country is characterised by clientelistic politics. Such politics can be defined as the politics that comes into being when powerful patrons drawn from the ruling elite perpetuate their hold on power through the use of their official position and access to the state, to provide voters and constituents with goods and services in exchange for the latter's continued support. Whether it is landlords in Punjab (Javid 2011; Martin 2014; Mohmand 2014) or criminal networks aligned with political parties in Karachi (Gayer 2014), the proposition that citizens support politically connected elites capable of providing them with patronage amidst the existence of a broadly undemocratic and dysfunctional system of governance, what Akhtar (2008) has referred to the as the ‘politics of common sense’, is one that has achieved the status of conventional wisdom. However, despite a broad consensus on the existence of patronage politics in Pakistan, comparatively little work has been done on outlining the precise mechanisms through which this form of politics operates; while it is acknowledged that patron–client politics exists, and ethnographic work on the subject has demonstrated the everyday forms of negotiation and contestation that characterise it at the local level, there is a corresponding lack of focus on the institutional framework of patronage politics, particularly in terms of how legislation, political parties and the formal apparatuses of the state shape and determine the receipt and disbursement of patronage.

The lack of attention paid to the actual institutional moorings of patronage politics in Pakistan is compounded by an absence of analytical work focusing on the changes and opportunities generated by the country's recent transition to democracy. While there is a considerable body of scholarly work that has examined the impact of colonialism and military authoritarianism on the structure of Pakistan's political institutions, less has been said about the ways in which almost a decade of uninterrupted, if often flawed, democracy has begun to transform the country's politics into something arguably akin to what Chandra (2004) has called a ‘patronage democracy’, in which the public sector remains an essential provider of employment and services,1 and in which those charged with distributing state resources can exercise considerable discretion in doing so.