IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/pid/journl/v47y2008i2p129-151.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Politics of Service Delivery in Pakistan: Political Parties and the Incentives for Patronage, 1988-1999

Author

Listed:
  • Zahid Hasnain

    (The World Bank, Pakistan.)

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of the political party structure on the incentives for politicians to focus on patronage versus service delivery improvements in Pakistan. By analysing inter-provincial variations in the quality of service delivery in Pakistan, the paper argues that the more fragmented, factionalised, and polarised the party systems, the greater are the incentives for patronage, weakening service delivery improvements. Fragmentation and factionalism both exacerbate the information problems that voters have in assigning credit (blame) for service delivery improvements (deterioration), thereby creating the incentives for politicians to focus on targeted benefits. Polarisation, particularly ethnic polarisation, reduces the ability of groups to agree on the provision of public goods, again causing politicians to favour the delivery of targeted benefits.

Suggested Citation

  • Zahid Hasnain, 2008. "The Politics of Service Delivery in Pakistan: Political Parties and the Incentives for Patronage, 1988-1999," The Pakistan Development Review, Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, vol. 47(2), pages 129-151.
    • Handle: RePEc:pid:journl:v:47:y:2008:i:2:p:129-151
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.pide.org.pk/pdf/PDR/2008/Volume2/129-151.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Manzoor Ahmed & Khalid Khan, 2014. "An Essay on the Political Economy of Fiscal Policy Making in Pakistan," International Journal of Business, Economics and Management, Conscientia Beam, vol. 1(9), pages 229-241.
    2. Ahmed, Manzoor & Baloch, Akhtar, 2017. "The Political Economy of Development: A Critical Assessment of Balochistan, Pakistan," MPRA Paper 80754, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 25 Jul 2017.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Public Goods; Models of Political Processes: Rent Seeking; Elections; Legislatures; and Voting Behaviour; Health; Education; and Welfare: General;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • H41 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Public Goods
    • I00 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - General - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pid:journl:v:47:y:2008:i:2:p:129-151. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Khurram Iqbal (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/pideipk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.