WHEN EVERYONE GOVERNS:CATCH-ALL COALITIONS AND ELECTORAL ACCOUNTABILITY IN PAKISTAN, 2018–2024

Abstract

It focuses on the case of catch-all coalition politics in Pakistan in 2018-24, which was marked by an unstable party configuration, a civil-military crisis, and a divided electoral environment. Based on the catch-all party thesis by Kirchheimer, principal-agent theory and subnational election data, the paper explores the hypothesis that broad-tent governing coalitions in Pakistan have systematically reduced vertical electoral accountability. The article states that the spread of heterogeneous coalitions, especially the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) and the following coalition government of 2022-2024, have resulted in the creation of programmatic diffusion, diffusion of blame attribution, and deterioration of retrospective voting. Based on the original dataset of constituency-level electoral results of the 2018 and 2024 general elections, cross-tabulated with the governance indicators and records of forming a cabinet, the study reveals that the correlation between coalition size and voters accountability outcomes is statistically significant and negative. The implications of these findings are that they added to the existing literature on comparative politics in multi-party governance in hybrid regimes and that they have implications to democratic consolidation in South Asia.