Pakistan’s Political Paradox: Elected Governments, Unelected Power

Abstract

Pakistan’s Political Paradox: Elected Governments, Unelected Power examines the persistent asymmetry between formally elected civilian administrations and the dominant role of unelected institutions chiefly the military establishment in shaping policy and political outcomes. Tracing the historical roots from pre-independence military centrality through successive coups (1958, 1977, 1999) to contemporary hybrid arrangements, the study employs historical process tracing and a qualitative case-study approach to analyze post-2008 developments, including the 18th Amendment’s limited success in rebalancing power, the 2018 engineered elections, the 2022 ouster of Imran Khan, and the 2025 27th Constitutional Amendment that institutionalized military primacy via the Chief of Defence Forces role. Drawing on hybrid regime theory (tutelary democracy and competitive authoritarianism) combined with civil-military imbalance models, the article dissects informal and formal mechanisms of control political engineering, media capture, judicial alignments, bureaucratic influence, and economic leverage through military conglomerates that sustain tutelary oversight beneath an electoral façade. Contemporary manifestations reveal elected governments functioning as junior partners, subordinated in security, foreign affairs, and strategic economic domains, while systematic suppression of opposition and institutional capture erode democratic substance. The analysis concludes that this adaptive hybridity ensures short-term regime stability but perpetuates long-term fragility, democratic backsliding, and governance inefficiency. Sustainable resolution requires structural reforms to establish genuine civilian supremacy, including defense oversight, economic demilitarization, judicial independence, and societal consensus against tutelary guardianship. Absent such transformation, Pakistan risks deeper authoritarian consolidation amid mounting internal and external pressures.

Keywords: Pakistan, Civil-Military Relations, Hybrid Regime, Tutelary Democracy, Military Establishment, Democratic Backsliding