And hopefully Jumaina, my colleague, will be here momentarily and can slip into the moderator seat, but we'll go ahead and get started. My name is Andrew Wilder. I'm the Vice President of the Asia Center here at USIP. And so I'd like to welcome you all here, especially first-time visitors. I see many familiar faces as well. For those of you who are new, USIP is an independent national institution dedicated to the proposition that peace is possible. It's practical and it's essential for our national security. We like to think ourselves as a think and do tank. We support analytical work and policy relevant analysis, but we also support programs in countries around the world. And we've been active in Pakistan for more than a decade supporting programs there around the broad theme of trying to create greater tolerance of diversity, as we think that's a major driver of conflict not only in Pakistan, but around the world these days. And so that's been a theme of a lot of our programmatic efforts in Pakistan. But we've also been working on the issue of preventing electoral violence. Elections has been, we worked on a program in the 2013 elections, but also for this round of elections, we supported some analytical work, including on topics we'll be hearing more on today on preventing electoral violence, as well as women's participation in elections, and then supporting other programmatic efforts as well. This topic is a topic near and dear to my heart. 25 years ago, I was sitting in Lahore doing research from my dissertation on voting behavior in the Punjab. My book never became a bestseller, but it's nevertheless still very interesting and relevant. So please do read it. But it's great today to welcome many individuals who I think are representing a new generation of scholars on Pakistan. And so it's great to welcome all of you today. Thank you for coming. And I think without taking more time myself, I'm going to turn it over to Colin, who will start moderating the first panel in Jumaina's absence. And with that, over to you, Colin. Sure. So again, thanks everybody for joining us here today. As you saw in the agenda, we're going to spend our first panel focusing specifically on more of the formal electoral processes, the factors that went into the election results, perhaps. And then after this, we'll have a brief break to refresh your tea and coffee, and then we'll have a second panel where we'll look at some of the actors outside the formal political system who also influenced the elections, the judiciary, the military, other groups. But for starters, we have a panel of experts here from a couple different academic institutions. Briefly, we have Maryam Mufti from the University of Waterloo. We have Sahar Shafkat at St. Mary's College, and Sarah Khan, who's about to be joining Yale University. And I'm Colin Cookman, and I'm here at the U.S. Institute of Peace. So I think initially I'm going to give a few sort of summary remarks about the election results themselves. I'm assuming you're all here on a Thursday morning, a month after the Pakistani election, so you're probably generally familiar with what happened and interested in this subject, but just so we're all sort of on the same page, we'll start with that. And then Maryam will speak a little bit more to the parties and their, particularly their selection of candidates, those dynamics. Sahar will discuss the opposition as it's now emerged after the elections, and Sarah will discuss voter participation and particularly women's voter participation. And then from there, we will look forward to discussion amongst you all and amongst the panel about these issues before we shift to the second panel later in the morning. So with that, so again, just as we all saw, the outcome of the elections was sort of after years in the opposition, the Pakistan, Turkey and Saf, won a working majority in the National Assembly, but perhaps not a commanding one. They've been obliged to form coalitions with several smaller parties and independents. I think after the last election cycle in 2013, we perhaps saw a degree of regional polarization amongst the parties, and certainly there's still some of that in terms of the concentration of the PMLN in Punjab and the PPP in Sindh, but now the PTI has been able to form coalition, form governments in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunwan at the national level, and so is perhaps in a role to facilitate greater national policy making cohesion by virtue of the fact that it is in some respects a national coalition party, but I think that may also raise the potential for greater factualization within the party, now that elections are past us and to the degree to which sort of regional issues disputes over resource sharing end up becoming issues for the future government. So I would say, you know, generally at the national and provincial level, particularly prior to the elections earlier this spring, we saw major fractures and shake ups within the political parties. Obviously, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's disqualification and conviction was the most prominent sort of point of friction, but also earlier the provincial government collapsed in Balochistan and the fragmentation of the MQM in Karachi over several years. And we'll hear more about this in the second panel, but certainly the judiciary played a very active role. And despite a fairly restrictive media environment, there were many reports of military interventions behind the scenes in terms of pushing candidates to perhaps defect from particular parties. And I think we can say broadly speaking, although Nawaz Sharif was the most prominent political player to be disqualified, and most of the other national figures did contest the elections, broadly speaking sort of enforcement of accountability was selective, I think we can say, or contingent, and this was not necessarily a level playing field between all parties. That said, I would say the Election Commission and the Caretaker Administration did a reasonably good job in terms of providing information about the elections up until election night itself when we saw the apparent breakdown of its results transmission system and many complaints from the political parties that their candidate agents were barred from observing final polling station level counts, which does raise some questions about the integrity of the reported results, which unfortunately I think we don't currently have the means of independently assessing. All that said, taking the available data at face value, which you probably should not do, this was a more fragmented election than previous election cycles. There are a couple of different ways that can be measured, but I think the political science field often uses the measure of effective parties, which is basically a weighted count of the number of parties contesting in a constituency adjusted to reflect their relative vote shares. Within Pakistan, there is a lot of variation between individual constituencies and certainly between the provinces. Balochistan and the former federally administered tribal areas are much more multipartisan environments than Punjab or previously send, but overall the average number of effective parties in the constituencies in this election cycle was 3.5 compared to 3.3 in 2013 and 2.8 in 2008. Generally speaking, this in a first past post system like Pakistan, that means you have more splitting of the vote and the potential for plurality as opposed to majority candidates coming into office. And while I don't think it reaches the level of statistical significance, broadly speaking, a winning PTI candidate in 2018 did appear to be generally correlated with a more divided constituency in terms of the effective number of effective parties. So if you couple this with the defections that we saw earlier in the spring, particularly in South Punjab, but also elsewhere, I think that would be one potential explanation for how the PTI won its victory, namely sort of splitting the opposition for a number of factors potentially going into that, but that being one particular one possible explanation. Punjab shifted towards much more of a two-party contest in this election cycle compared to the previous. The PPP was not as much of a factor and so it was more of a PML and versus PTI race in most cases. And CIND in particular became much more fragmented as the dominance of the MQM in Karachi and also to some degree the PPP and the rest of CIND weakened. But generally speaking, the PTI was the beneficiary of the disproportionalities that are part of a first past the post system and so it ended up winning about 42% of all national assembly seats that were contested on the basis of about 32% of the national popular vote. So races were more competitive or at least more narrowly determined this election cycle with smaller margins of victory on average. It was about 12.6% for all national and provincial assembly races this time compared to about 19% in 2013. Although this might be, this would be sort of skewed slightly by slight decline in overall turnout and particularly pronounced drop in turnout in CIND. That's turnout as a measure of votes recorded. So again the question of what those votes represent, maybe that's voters cast, maybe that's other means of controlling the particular vote measures. I don't know that I can definitively say one way or another, but the MQM collapse in Karachi as I said was particularly noteworthy and this has helped reshape political dynamics in CIND and at the national level. The MQM went from an average margin of victory of more than 50%. That's the margin of victory not the vote share in constituencies where they won in 2013 to an average margin of victory of about 10% in 2018 and they lost about 40% of their combined national and provincial assembly seats in the process. So previously a major swing block within the national assembly and now markedly reduced. The PMLN did not experience quite so significant a loss, but its average margin of victory in the constituencies that it did win halved to about 10% and it contested fewer seats than the PTI nationwide and generally did poorly outside of its Cork constituencies in Punjab. Of the three major national parties the PPP had the highest average margin of victory in the constituencies where it won and it actually picked up a few national assembly seats compared to its losses in 2013, but it had the lowest rate of success for its again a major three for its candidates total number of contesting candidates. So again it's generally been limited to its base and CIND province for the second election cycle in a row now. But as we've seen during the presidential elections and issues over leadership positions within the assemblies the PPP is now potentially positioned to replace the MQM as the most important swing block in the new parliament to the extent to which it is able to play that role. Last bit of election statistics I'll throw at you was that this was generally a more anti-incumbent election than previous cycles. Now there are several potential factors that can explain this. The electoral composition changed with redistricting, redrawing of constituency boundaries. Certainly there have been changes in terms of the electorate, in terms of who is registered to vote, and this is tracking incumbency on a party basis, so candidates may have shifted from one party to another and brought supporters with them. But overall there was a lower rate of party seat retention in this election compared to previous. There's a tremendous amount of variation between constituencies on this, but in the prior election cycle if your party had won a margin of victory of about 20%, that was generally the threshold by which candidates then could be assumed to win election in the 2013 elections, and in this election cycle it was about 40%. So this is again skewed to a considerable degree by sort of the collapse of the MQM margins in Karachi, but generally speaking I think it suggests a potentially higher level of volatility in future elections, particularly given the narrower margins of victory that we observed this time. And I guess since we are also looking forward from the elections, I think the last point I would just make is elections I think as we all know are not necessarily fully accepted as the means of adjudicating power sharing in Pakistan. So elections have set the stage for competition, but now that the assemblies are seated we have new governments, we can expect the parties and the various interest groups that participate in the Pakistani political system to continue their competition. And so I think we can potentially draw some insights from the elections, but certainly the nature by which political competition is structured now is going to change as people hold new institutional powers. So I think the last time around after its losses, the PTI through a variety of avenues was able to continue to contest for power and challenge the PML and government, and so I think the question we'll be looking at going forward is how the opposition, which at least currently appears to be fairly divided, looks to sort of reassert itself going forward, but that would be my opening summary and turn it back to the others. Thank you, Colin, for your excellent remarks and also moderating in my absence. I apologize for being late. I did want to note before we move to Mariam that this event is being webcast and is on the record, and you can also follow on Twitter, hashtag USIP Pakistan. So I'll hand it over to Mariam. All right, so thank you. Hang on, do I have to do something with this? All right, so thank you very much and thank you to the USIP for organizing this event and promises to be two excellent panels on the Pakistani election. Now, I'm going to switch gears while Colin has given us a really, really good overview of the electoral results. I'm going to focus a little bit more on what happened prior to the election. So I'm going to be focusing on the process of candidate selection and why is it that the candidates who contested, why some of them proved to be successful and what that actually means for Pakistan going forward. Now, in 2018, some 3,400 candidates contested the National Assembly election, of which 53% were party candidates, while the remaining 47% contested as independents. Now, in the Q&A, I can talk a little bit more about why it is that in Pakistan we have nearly 50% of the candidates being independents and almost an equal amount being party candidates. But for now, I do want to make a quick parenthetical note about the data that I'm going to be presenting today. I'm using Form 47 released by the Election Commission of Pakistan to talk about these election results and also about the candidates who won. There are a number of discrepancies in Form 47, so please bear that in mind and please don't take the numbers that I am going to be citing as being accurate. The other thing to keep in mind is that according to Article 223 of the Constitution, there are a number of seats vacant right now, which have been vacated by politicians who contested more than one seat in Pakistan and then subsequently had to vacate the other seats that they won. At the same time, so in Ron Khan, for instance, contested five seats, I think he won all five if I'm not mistaken. So he had to vacate four, for example, and retain one. So please bear this in mind as I continue. Now the two largest political parties in Pakistan, PTI and PMLN, PMLN fielded 215 candidates while PTI fielded 244 candidates. So as Colin mentioned, PTI did field more candidates in a larger number of constituencies, which called into question PMLN's claim to be nationally representative. So PMLN did not contest 21% of the constituencies and it only won seats in Punjab and KP. PTI, on the other hand, did manage to win seats in all the provinces. So from that perspective, it's interesting to note that the PTI really did put its best foot forward in this election and perhaps even a better foot forward than the PMLN. This election was also unique in that the Supreme Court mandated that each political party ought to reserve 5% of its ticket nominations for women. And Sarah is probably going to speak to this a little bit more later, but I do want to make a quick note here. Each political party did more or less meet this 5% quota, which actually means just fielding 12 candidates, 12 to 15 candidates, so it's not a huge dent. However, what's interesting is that the number of women who successfully won general seats, that number did not in fact change. So very quickly, a quick comparison. In 2018, 175 women contested on the general seats, whereas in 2013 it was 135. In 2018, and this is significant, 34% of these women were independent, whereas in 2013, 55% of these women were independent. So clearly that 5% quota helped, because a number of women actually contested on party tickets. In 2018, eight women have won the general seat, whereas in 2013, nine won. So actually, at the end of the day, there's no real difference in the representation, descriptive representation of women. However, in 2013, women did fare better, because 14 women were runners up, whereas in 2018, only 10 women were runners up. So I think we do need to pay attention to what's happening as far as women are concerned on the general seats, because it's important to have women equally represented in Pakistan. Now, the most interesting, I think, and important change is that the religious political party seated ground on the role of women in politics, and they actually fielded women on general seats for the first time. Now, I don't know if this is a change in ideological rhetoric, and the reason I questioned it a little bit is also because the JUIF, for example, fielded women in those constituencies where other political parties were also fielding women, which basically means that they were looking for either an even playing ground for the women to participate in politics, or at least in a constituency where it was normalized for women to be present in politics. So what's a worth paying attention to? Now, let's move to the process of candidate selection. Generally speaking, in Pakistan, candidates are selected at the level of the constituency by a group of members constituting a parliamentary board, in the case of the PMLN or the Central Executive Committee of the party, like in the case of the PTI. Now, the decisions of this electorate are supposed to be final, but we all know that the party leader actually has the authority to change the decision or amend the decision according to their own thinking about how the candidate selection should be done. All the applicants, the aspirants to the party ticket are required to pay a ticket application fee. There is no consensus on what this ticket application fee is. In 2013, we know that for PMLN, it was 50,000 rupees for the National Assembly seat, but we also know that candidates paid up to 200,000 rupees for the National Assembly seat. So who knows? PTI's National Assembly seat was for 27,000 rupees. Now, in US dollar terms, this is actually nominal amounts, but in Pakistan, the fact that aspirants can buy their way into political power needs to be taken into account, and I think it's important to mention. Now, the difference between the PMLN and the PTI, as far as formal processes is concerned, is that in PMLN, the decision of the electorate is final, because the party leader is part of that electorate. However, in the PTI, the electorate is different, and then the party leader then gets to change the decision if he, in this case, Imran Khan does not like it, right? So in PTI, although it's a multi-stage method of candidate selection, informally, we know that at the end of the day, the different tiers of decision making don't really matter, because at the end of the day, the party leader is making the decision, which makes the candidate selection process completely exclusive. Now, this is important. If the candidate selection process is exclusive, that means the loyalty of the candidate should be to the people who selected him or her and gave them the party ticket, right? Which means that candidates should be loyal to the political party. In America, where voters in the primaries nominate the candidate, the candidate usually owes their loyalty to the voters directly. In Pakistan, however, the exact opposite is happening. It's exclusive candidate selection, but candidates are not necessarily loyal to the political party, as we see in the rampant party switching that goes on in Pakistan, all right? I'm going to come back to this towards the end, but please make note of it. Now, we assume in Pakistan that a political party candidate selection strategy is to win a maximum number of seats. And that is to a large extent true, and that is pretty much what's happening in Pakistan as well. However, we also know that these political parties are fielding weak candidates in constituencies, and that is a purposeful decision. Both PMLN and PTI fielded weak candidates in constituencies for a variety of reasons. For example, they needed to balance the candidate list. They needed to make sure that the provincial assembly candidate and the national assembly candidate were actually bolstering one another and were not going against each other, right? Political parties also sometimes need to balance the voter's choice, or the electorate's choice, which they are aware of through their collection of intelligence at the local level. Or they need to balance the ideals of the party, as might be the case in political parties like Jama'at-e-Islami or the MQM and so on. In 2018, the most important factor in candidate selection, interestingly enough, was loyalty, all right? We know that when political parties select candidates, they look at the financial viability of the candidate. The candidates record as in previous office, their record in delivering patronage goods and services and so on. That's all very well the case, but in this particular election, loyalty was a very significant factor. Now, for PMLN, loyalty has by far been the most important candidacy requirement because PMLN, as we all know, has been hurt by defections in the past when PMLQ was created and has not wanted to take on many of these defectors back into the fold of the party. And in 2018, in the wake of the Panama crisis, again, as Colin mentioned, PMLN found itself in a position where it had to be very careful about who it selected. So if we look at the list of individuals who won on the PMLN ticket, 86% of the candidates had actually contested the 2013 election and then made a comeback. So as far as PMLN is concerned, we don't see very much of a turnover, right? PTI, on the other hand, had a completely different strategy going into this election. So loyalty was something that they did not take into account at all. PTI was not necessarily giving party tickets to individuals who had been with the PTI in the long term. In fact, Imran Khan is quoted to have said that one man cannot win the election by himself. He needs electables to help win the election. So in the media, we all assume that PTI's candidate selection strategy was very much to accept whoever was the strongest candidate in the constituency into the party, regardless of who the candidate was. Now, this is problematic for PTI because it went against its constitutionally mandated candidacy requirements, okay? And these are interesting. You have to have honest sources of wealth. You need to have paid your taxes consistently since the age that is required for paying taxes in Pakistan. Now, if we were to go into the asset declarations of many of the candidates who actually won on the PTI ticket, we know that that is patently not true, okay? So PTI's candidate selection was very much based on an electoral strategy where the party needed to win. Right? And to a large extent, this strategy was successful for PTI. So in Punjab, it won 43% of the seats. 70% of these seats were won by electables. And overall, in Pakistan, 60% of PTI seats were won by electables. Now, who is an electable? The term electable is bandied about a lot in the media. In this particular context, the way I got these numbers was by defining an electable as an individual whose independent support bases make them well placed to win elections and are therefore desirable candidates. In this particular case, I was taking into account their economic and social resources, control over land and labor, manipulation of kinship, networks, and alliances. The problem in coming up with accurate numbers, like the kind that I just presented to you, is that it's very hard to distinguish an electable from a party worker. So a party worker is an individual who's been loyal to the political party and has been an activist consistently with the political party. And so to get around this particular problem, in PTI's case, I discounted any individual who joined Imran Khan in 1997 when PTI came into existence and without any political clout, but may have accumulated political clout over time. So they may actually have the appearance of an electable now, but back in 1997, they did not. So these are individuals who are genuinely party workers and have been loyal to the party as activists. So why should we care in the two minutes that I have left? We should care about candidate selection because it says a lot about the nature of party organization in Pakistan and the level of party institutionalization, party system institutionalization in Pakistan. The one thing that political parties are doing is like, and what PTI has done specifically, let's just take PTI into account as far as the 2018 election is concerned, relying on candidates to win the seat for the political party. At the expense of the party actually establishing strong linkages with the voters themselves, puts PTI in a very, very difficult position. Number one, PTI cannot rely on the credible commitment of any of these legislators that it has actually formed the government with, which means that these individuals may not tow the party line. Now, as far as legislative voting is concerned, it doesn't matter because there's Article 63, which is the anti-defection clause in the Constitution. And for that reason, no one's going to vote against the political party. But even if they were to vote against the political party, the political party would not necessarily disqualify them or remove them from the assembly. PTI, however, is extremely unpredictable. It has disqualified people in the past. It has gotten rid of party members who have gone against Imran Khan's wishes in KP government, and therefore it could happen again. All right. So it would be very interesting to see how Imran Khan is going to enforce party discipline. The second thing, of course, is that by prioritizing candidate voter linkages as opposed to party voter linkages, we are always going to see rampant party switching prior to an election like we saw in this particular election as well. And it's interesting to note that in 2013, two out of every five candidates switched political parties, 44 percent of the people who won seats on a PTI ticket were party switchers. So I think party switching needs to be looked at. It also perpetuates the logic of clientelism. And this needs to be talked about in a little bit more detail. And I don't have time, so I might just answer a question about this. But in the case of PTI, by reinforcing candidate voter linkages, we have also undermined legislative activity, where candidates do not feel the need to be legislators in the national assembly, but in fact, be individuals who are serving their constituents who voted them into power. And it reinforces that unfortunate logic of clientelism. Now, PTI has enforced policies in KP that is changing that. And it would be interesting to see if they can actually pull it off in Punjab. It might just happen. Last of all, and this is my last and final point, which is that the Pakistan Terikin staff is going to have trouble as far as its cabinet is concerned. Please note that 50 percent of the cabinet is composed of individuals from other political parties who are close allies in the election, like Sheikh Rashid. For example, but mostly it is individuals who have joined PTI after PTI won a majority of seats in the election. So I just want to point out a few names. And these are all individuals who worked in the Musharraf government. So they were all ex-PMLQ. Zubeda Jalal, minister, has been appointed minister of Amida Mirza, ex-PPP, ex-PECO of the National Assembly. Nural Haqqadri, party switcher, Hulam Sarver Khan, party switcher, Khusro Bakhtiyar, party switcher. So 50 percent of your cabinet is made up of party switchers. And I think this is partly due to, A, the way PTI did its candidate selection, but also PTI's willingness and desire to form a government, which I'm not questioning them on. Absolutely. That's why they're in the business of politics. But they find themselves in this position because of their willingness to work with partners that they're not necessarily ideologically aligned with. And that comes from the candidate selection strategy, but also from the willing and dealing that it's had to do to form the government post-election. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mariam. We'll move to Dasar. Hi, everyone. Thank you also to USIP for the invitation and to my fellow panelists for, I think, what a shaping up to be a really awesome event and hopefully discussion. So I'm going to switch gears a little bit again and talk about the opposition and go even further back before the elections. I want to sort of take a look back at the last two terms, parliamentary terms, because we now actually have that data to look at and sort of think a little bit about what this means going forward. So I'm going to talk about what we sort of theoretically expect oppositions to behave like in a parliamentary democracy and why that's important. I want to talk about how the opposition, the major opposition parties, behaved in the last two parliamentary terms. And I want to end with maybe a couple of predictions moving forward, even though I keep telling my students that I got out of the prediction business after the 2016 US election, I will venture a couple of predictions. So let me start with talking a little bit about oppositions and how sort of democratic theory generally thinks about opposition parties in a parliamentary democracy. So there's this idea that's sort of widely accepted of this loyal opposition, that opposition parties are absolutely supposed to be critical of the government that are supposed to challenge the ruling parties on substantive grounds, but that they're not supposed to undermine the system, that they're supposed to accept the supremacy of parliament. We also have this idea that opposition parties should also not undermine national security. So for example, in the US, we have this idea that politics, quote unquote, politics stops at water's edge. And of course, that's not actually true, politics never stops anywhere. But this sort of idea is deeply ingrained. And so this belief that you need a robust opposition that is still loyal, that doesn't essentially create too many waves is deeply embedded and is considered vital for democratic health. Parliamentary democracy is supposed to require that all major players accept the supremacy of parliament, and that especially opposition parties accept that all major policy decisions will be made within the parliamentary context, including especially the allocation of resources. And again, as I said, this is not actually true in reality anywhere really. Certainly in Pakistan, it's not true because foreign policy, national security policy, defense expenditures, those are all policy domains that are sort of off limits for parliamentary debate and discussion. But that's not exclusive to Pakistan. We see something similar happening in the US where there really is no sort of robust legislative discussion of defense expenditures or foreign policy, for example. So the question I want to sort of raise today is, is it really all that terrible for opposition parties to use extra parliamentary tactics and strategies to achieve their political ends? Is it really all that destructive of democratic health? And what I want to do is very briefly tell the story of the two sort of major political opposition players in the last two governments in Pakistan. So again, I'll try to be brief. But the two sort of examples that I want to touch on are the PMLN when it was the major opposition player in the PPP government starting in 2008. And I want to talk a little bit about how the PMLN sort of deployed extra parliamentary mobilization to achieve its ends. And then I want to talk about the PTI, which was a major opposition player in the last PMLN government and the way in which it deployed extra parliamentary tactics. And I'm going to argue that there was a difference in the impact that the PMLN's actions had versus the PTI's actions. So a little bit of sort of background. Some of you may remember that in 2007 the previous Musharraf dictatorial, Musharraf government, was in power and very famously took on a clash with the judiciary, with the higher judiciary and Parish Musharraf ended up firing all judges, unconstitutionally illegally firing all judges of the higher judiciary, which set up this clash with the judicial branch. And there was this popular movement that rose up called the Lawyers Movement that basically was defending these judges and essentially the independence of the judicial branch. The PMLN actually took a very pretty strong supportive position with this stance. And it did this for a number of reasons. Certainly it made sense to oppose Musharraf using any means. And the Musharraf government seemed vulnerable at the time for lots of reasons. And here was a popular movement that was attacking him. So absolutely let's support it. There does seem to, I mean there seems to have been some sort of sense of sort of real sincere commitment to the independence of the judiciary as well for some PMLN folks.  After the elections, which forced Musharraf out of power, the PPP won those elections in 2008, I know ancient history. And yet the judges were not restored. And the PMLN kept pushing this issue but within the confines of parliament, even as there was this popular movement that kept going. And it wasn't actually until more than a year later that this movement ended up organizing second long march to Islamabad demanding these judges to be restored. And it was only during the second march that the PMLN formally gave its blessing to this march, to this extra parliamentary mobilization and actually joined in. It actually, in fact, mobilized its workers, its members, it sort of really threw its weight behind this. The demands were ultimately accepted. And interestingly, PMLN could have at the time pressed forward its advantage and demanded the resignation of the PPP government, for example, but it did not. In fact, it retreated to parliament after these demands were met. And my sort of point in bringing this up is to remind ourselves that even though the party as an opposition absolutely jumped onto this popular mobilization, it ultimately accepted the supremacy of parliament and sort of remained within those confines for the remainder of the PPP term. Switching gears, let me talk briefly about the second example, which is that of the PTI and its mobilization during the last government, when PMLN was in fact in power. So again, some of you may remember that the PTI, as soon as the elections had taken place, alleged massive voter fraud, and essentially argued that the elections should be null and void because, in fact, the PTI had won the elections, not the PMLN, and that there should be a redo or something. And quite famously or perhaps infamously, of course, Imran Khan refused to sort of acknowledge the legitimacy of parliament and would not even really spend any time there as an opposition party leader. And in 2014, the party ended up mobilizing outside parliament, again, using these extra parliamentary tactics to launch what it called an Azadi march, again, another long march to Islamabad. And this time it demanded, the main demands were the resignation of the PMLN government and new elections. And my argument is that that sort of popular mobilization outside parliament was actually quite damaging to parliamentary legitimacy because it, in fact, did undermine the entire system by refusing at all to engage with it and indeed calling for it to be disbanded. That brings me to a couple of predictions. So I guess let me just sort of bottom line that point. The point is extra parliamentary mobilization does not necessarily mean dangers for parliamentary democracy. It matters in what manner that mobilization is happening and especially what kinds of demands are being alleged and being called for. So after this particular election, the 2018 election, we have the landscape changed all over again. And as Colin described really nicely, the PTI is now very much in the driver's seat. It has now formed the government. So a few sort of questions for us, right? Number one, the PTI and Imran Khan, which has famously sort of spurned parliament's legitimacy. Is it going to find now all of a sudden that parliament is actually a place worth spending time in? And my prediction is yes. They will actually have a change of heart and realize that actually, yes, important things happen here. We should spend time here. We should engage in some kind of legislative work. And I think we're beginning to see that. The second sort of prediction I think that also Colin maybe alluded to is the role of the PPP, which actually is probably going to remain quite committed to parliamentary legitimacy and parliamentary supremacy because it has this opportunity to play this role of a swing block. And so it actually has a lot of influence now as a result. And then the last sort of thought or prediction is are we going to continue seeing these extra parliamentary mobilizations? Are we going to see more long marches? Are we going to see more sit-ins? Are we going to see more dharnas? And yeah, I think we are. And I think it's because it's clear that the conditions that surround the uncertainty of institutional survival in Pakistan is sufficient that it provides incentives for oppositions to engage in extra parliamentary mobilization. It works. It worked for PTI. It worked for PMLN. And my best guess is that it will be the PMLN again once it regroups that will engage in something like that. But actually a lot of the opposition actors, I think, are poised to engage in something like that again, except for the PPP. I don't think that that is going to, I don't think, I don't expect them to be engaging in something like that. So let me just stop there and maybe we can pick up in the Q&A. Thank you.  So I'll just echo all of the panelists and thanking USIP for organizing the event and thanks to all of you for coming out here on a Thursday morning. So I'm going to speak a little bit about the gendered dimension of this election, especially how it pertains to gender gaps in participation both at the voter and candidate level. And this is something that has increasingly become an important issue in Pakistan. I'm going to say a little bit about the initiatives taken at a formal and institutional level to address women's underrepresentation and sort of how successful those initiatives are given how the 2018 election played out. So to start, one of the first places that a gender gap in political participation manifests itself is at the level of voter registration. So if we look at the electoral rolls for 2018, women make up 44% of registered voters, which is obviously lower than their share in the adult voting population. Having said that, these numbers have increased for women by 24% since 2013 and for men by 22%. And so the increase is actually a little larger for women. And this is broadly because of very targeted efforts since 2013 to close this gender registration gap. So the Electoral Commission of Pakistan set up a dedicated gender wing to work on this problem. It also actually used pretty fine-grained data on registration at the census block level to target registration drives to areas with particularly low registration rates. And so having this fine-grained data and being able to target efforts in this way is why we're sort of seeing this increase in women's registration numbers in particular. Now the gap is still large and that's mostly because we're working from a pretty sizable gap at baseline. So in order to close it, what needs to happen is sustained increases in this registration for women and needs to actually grow at a substantially higher rate than the registration level for men to achieve parity in electoral roles. So moving beyond sort of the gap in registration, then the question becomes how does this registration translate into actual turnout on election day? So when we look at levels of turnout and I think Colin has sort of given us the cautionary note on how we can interpret those numbers as has Miriam, but what we're seeing at the national level is about a 10 percentage point gap between male and female voter turnout. Now this 10% gap masks a lot of variation that exists at the constituency level. So there are constituencies like the one that has the highest gap which is a 46 percentage point difference between male and female turnout in the Shangla constituency in KP. And then there's also sizable gaps for instance a 26 percentage point gap in one of the constituencies in Peshawar and a 19 percentage point gap in one of the constituencies in Lahore. And then there are certain constituencies where women's turnout is just a little bit higher than that of men. So there's a lot of variation underlying that national level gap of 10%. In terms of sort of the institutional measures to address this gap, first of all one important thing to note is that this is the first time we have numbers on gender disaggregated voter turnout at a very low level. So Miriam spoke about Form 47 which are constituency level returns. This is the first time that we have polling station level returns that are gender disaggregated for voter turnout and this is huge because one of the reasons why the efforts for closing the gap in registration were effective was because they could be targeted at areas with particularly high gaps. And what having this gender disaggregated data for turnout means is that future efforts to improve women's turnout can hopefully be targeted in a similar way. So I just want to note that this data is really important for designing interventions and policy going forward. Okay, so we have this data and in terms of institutional measures in the Election Act of 2017 the Election Commission is empowered to declare null and void the election in any constituency where women's turnout is less than 10% of the total turnout for the particular constituency. So this is a pretty strong signal from sort of the state and legislative authorities that women's turnout and this gender gap is an important priority. However, what does this law actually mean on the ground? That's a little bit of a different story and one of the sort of criticisms about the effectiveness of this law is that it's at a constituency level rather than at a more local polling station level. So what it's targeted to do is address the issue of absolute bans on women's turnout which are a rare occurrence but they do happen. So in the 2013 elections, there were particular constituencies and villages and this wasn't just in Khyberpikhtunkhwa. We also saw this happening in villages in Punjab where there was a ban on women's turnout. Now these bans are sort of negotiated between political parties, village and tribal leaders and there's something that takes place at a local level rather than a constituency level. So if we're trying to target these bans using an instrument of the law, the law really needs to be looking at a level that's lower than the constituency. So that's sort of one of the big criticisms about the ability of this law to actually address the issue of bans. Now bans on turnout are not the only reason why we see gaps in turnout. So there's also sort of the systematic lower level of women turning out in elections and this is sort of a product of a number of constraints. So first of all, it's important to note that this isn't something that's just like a rural phenomenon. It exists in the urban centers as I noted before. I mean Punjab's urban center Lahore has a constituency with a 19 percentage point gap in male and female turnout. So it's more than just sort of what you might think of as customary practices. There are certain structural constraints that are preventing women from participating at the same level as men. And so some of the constraints that I've identified in joint work with Dr. Ali Chima, Dr. Shandana Momand and Aasid Liakath in a project around women's participation is that women are sort of systematically disengaged from politics at a number of levels that then translates into this under participation on election day. So for instance, in surveys and focus groups, we see that women are less likely to watch political news and shows on television. They're less likely to engage in discussions about politics both within the home and especially outside the home. They're also less likely to report having been contacted by a political party worker. They're less likely to know their representatives at the local level. And so it's all of these sort of different facets of disengagement that are undergirding the low turnout that we see on election day. And if we're looking at trying to improve turnout, it's going to sort of take more than this kind of law that empowers the Election Commission to declare an election null and void. It requires sort of engaging with some of these deeply seated norms and structural constraints that are preventing women from participating. So the law is a good signal, but it's certainly no panacea to this gender gap that we see in turnout. So having said a little bit about women's participation as voters, I want to come back to the point that Maryam made about women's participation as candidates. So as Maryam mentioned, there's a law on the books for the first time that stipulated that parties had to nominate 5% of women candidates. And this didn't, as she noted, result in a substantial increase in numbers of women that were actually elected. And one of the reasons for this that was actually brought up by women candidates themselves were that these candidates were often fielded in constituencies that were uncompetitive for the party. So these women were nominated as candidates, but they were sort of done, it was done so in constituencies where they were set up to lose because the party wasn't competitive in those constituencies. So this is again where you see a limitation of sort of a legal instrument without sort of deeper changes in the way parties think about women candidates as being winnable or electable. So it speaks to sort of the limitations of the law when you still have pretty strong stereotypes about women as candidates. What I do want to note about this law though is that it's a really important shift in the way we think about quotas for women in Pakistan. So previously Pakistan has and continues to have reserved seats for women in both the national and provincial as legislatures as well as in local government. However, these seats are not directly elected and so they are given out in proportion to the seats that a party has won in the legislature. So what that means is that these women candidates that come on the reserve seats don't have constituencies to which they're, constituencies of voters to which they are responsive but rather they are loyal and responsive to the candidates and the party leadership that appointed them for a particular reserved seat. And so shifting to words having a quota for women on party lists as candidates for general seats is an important and welcome change because that enables them to actually fight a general election and develop a constituencies of voters. But of course what needs to happen is that these women need to be set up to win rather than to lose by being given seats or sort of being fielded as candidates in constituencies where the party can actually win because along with their gender of course partisanship is one of the most important things that voters assess candidates on. So I think I'll stop there and I'm happy to talk about both of these dimensions of women as voters and women as candidates more in the Q&A. Excellent, thank you all of you so much for your remarks. Before we open it up to questions I just wanted to throw a few questions out to the panel and anyone's feel free to take these. I think a common thread between all of your remarks is about party fragmentation, how parties are going to move forward in Pakistan given what we've seen over the last 10 years. A lot of investment has been made in what by international donors by political parties themselves into strengthening their political parties to strengthening their internal systems, their internal voting. But the way that we've seen this election turn out with so much party switching and as Maria mentioned people who are not members of the party being so significant parts of the cabinet what is the future of political parties in Pakistan? How is this going to shape the next election especially as we look towards local government elections in the next year and a half and then five years hopefully down the road knock on wood that you know we complete a five-year term? And then I think the flip side of that is in the opposition how strong is the opposition going to remain? There's already fragmentation within the opposition just on two major issues in just a week after the election the contesting of the results and then the fielding of presidential candidates so I leave it to the panel whoever would like to take the first crack at responding. Right. Okay so it's a hard question to answer for the simple reason that we haven't seen the PTI in government perform in government at the national level at the provincial level certainly and from the provincial level here are the signs that I would take you know as being important for PTI moving forward as a political party especially a party in government. So one thing that I did in KPE while it was in power was that it's limited the amount of development schemes that national members of the national assembly could actually deliver to their constituents and by doing that PTI legislators yes there were an opposition in the national assembly and therefore were not necessarily legislating in the same way as the PMLN was but what it did was that PTI members who did show up to parliament who were not outside protesting you know were apart from being spoilers within the legislative discussion were in fact focusing on legislation focusing on their activities in Islamabad as opposed to being working only for their constituents. Now if something similar like that happens at the national assembly level again as PTI moves forward then we may actually see a slight shift in this logic of clientelism that has been operating in Pakistan where legislators are devoted to their constituencies first and foremost and second to their legislative activity. May happen okay it's really hard to predict because I do think that Punjab is a different beast it's not the KP it's not a smaller province and PTI might not be able to implement something like this after all I think when I have interviewed candidates a majority of them have always said that the most important part of their job is constituency service and delivering services to their constituents and not legislation so I wonder to to what extent that will change the second thing I do want to make note of simply because I study candidate selection is that we can actually see a policy shift over there political parties can start taking these candidate selection decisions a little bit more seriously a little bit and to do them a little bit more systematic away and if they were to do that I think party fragmentation to a large extent can be limited if political party leaders are serious about party discipline and are serious about holding their candidates loyal to the political party which they can as per article 63 they can issue show cause notices they can censure rogue elements within the parliament you know if parties were to do that well then we might actually see a change we might actually see a shift away from the kind of party fragmentation kind of the factionalization that we've seen thus far the problem there and I'll just end with this the problem there is Parvez Allahi I interviewed him once and I asked him you know there's a there's a PMLQ forward block in in the Punjab assembly why are you not taking them to task and he is like look mariam in a very condescending way is like look mariam you don't understand how politics is done I need this forward block to remain PMLQ because when the senate election will happen they will vote for our guy so isn't that interesting I mean that's a that's a kind of institutional explanation of what party leaders are thinking when they actually don't issue show cause notices to candidates who are going against the party line within parliament and I think and I think that we that we need to take that seriously it just goes to show how effective the anti-defection clause is and it goes to show why it is that prior to my election candidates can think of switching political parties with complete impunity so that's that's my my take it's a very complicated question and I wish I had more time to answer it so I'll just say something about the opposition I know that a lot of people bemoaned that the opposition is so divided and it's true they sort of fell you know this group is called the grand opposition alliance it fell apart in I don't know a week or something mostly because of the pvp but I think it's because the people's party has this has a lot at stake in actually remaining engaged with the system and with parliament because they have such a big share of seats as an opposition player so I don't see that as a problem I don't see the fragmentation of the opposition necessarily as a problem moving forward and I also find it one thing I'll just sort of say about the pti well I guess one thing I'll just say is it I think that there's a little bit of an asymmetric sort of asymmetric behavior going on that is I think that the pti as you mentioned right like their their party discipline is is very different from say the pmln which seems to have enforced it much more you know more you know with mixed success and so what this means as the pti moves forward as a governing coalition will be very interesting because those some of those candidates are going to be quite happy to jump ship and there's nothing really kind of holding them together in that way I also think that because of the way that the pti has campaigned over the last really 10 years it has set itself up very very strongly to to has set up very strong expectations for being judged on performance legitimacy right like they have really set a high bar for themselves for having for delivering the basic sort of bread and butter things that they promise are going to be done and again these crazy deadlines like hundred days corruption is going to end and two weeks you know our balance of payments will be fixed it all kinds you know repeat will go up all kinds of promises that are being that are being made and so I think for me it'll it's interesting to it'll be interesting to see how the pti as a governing coalition responds when it's it's fails to deliver on a lot of what it's promised I hope it up to the I'm happy to open up to the audience if you would please use your mics because we are webcasting introduce yourself and please keep your questions short because we have only about 25 27 minutes for questions and I think we'll take a few questions and then let the panel respond I will let Andrew take this that's my boss yeah can't hold back just a quick one calling just on the incumbency factor I think maybe you said it maybe I missed it but you talked about the party seat incumbency and I'm wondering if you also have candidacy incumbency to if you just comment on the difference between those two and then the second one just in terms of opposition behavior so in terms of how the PPP's calculation is is it because they could be a swing block and get some of the goodies they want or is it a subset of that that the Dari's worry about nab cases and so they got them and so therefore they're telling the line to protect their Dari versus a broader party based interest my name's here on charcoal I am PhD student at so as the University of London my question for Colin is there's there's been some claims that the pti has done a particularly good job in capturing new voters particularly young voters that have come on the roll since the 2013 elections and I'm curious to see if the the data supports that my question for Mariam is about candidate selection do you see a difference in the processes that you described at the provincial versus national levels and in particular I'm curious whether it was different in KPK given the fact that they're an incumbent party there and they've already got sort of the you know they're coming from a completely different position and lastly my question for all of the the panelists is the the easy question what do you think the the effect of having now two democratic transitions will be given the fact you know taking into account the fact that in some ways we've got representative government rather than responsible government at this point thanks so I can respond so unfortunately I have not been able to code all the individual candidates so I do not have individual candidate and come and see but check back in a couple of months and maybe I'll have an answer for you I think the the on the new voters to PTI that was definitely something I heard a lot of in 2013 I actually have not looked into exit polls closely this round whether there was any I don't know if you've looked at that so I think it's an interesting question the the under 35 share of the registered voters the ECP hasn't put out detailed statistics on it but the press reporting it was actually slightly lower this time this cycle then last cycle in terms of percent at least percentage of registered voters but I don't actually I don't have good numbers on on youth youth vote between the parties yet but I believe Gallup Pakistan did work on the surveys on this previously so that might be one one resource and the only other point I'd make on the on the PPP is a swing block I think I do think this is particularly interesting to watch not I mean my answer would be it's probably from the PPP side it's probably a mix of motivations I think the question I would have is the degree to which the national government the PTI and and to to whatever extent the sort of judiciary and accountability organizations follow the national government on this or or lead it on this the degree which they take sort of a maximalist confrontational approach towards the PPP as perhaps the MQM experienced after 2013 whether whether sort of the the goal is to sort of suppress the swing block and and sort of whether there's a send operation as there was a Karachi operation early on in this government or whether it is or whether it is a more accommodational approach to the extent to which there's maybe an interest in preserving a divided opposition so I think there's there's interesting sort of strategic strategic questions on both sides on how the how the the two sides of that handle things and I don't have any answer yet on how it will go but certainly the PTI the PPP PPP is as of this week now facing its own joint investigation team against the former president Jardari so something to watch. Just a couple things to say to add about the PPP I agree I think it's super interesting and I think part of the dynamic here is that PPP has the government in sinned and so has it has sort of these you know multi-level calculations that it's making because it has there are ways in which it could cooperate with PTI at the provincial level that then could translate into some kind of working relationship at the national level the corruption thing I know a lot of people have talked about nab and the fact that it is in fact investigating Zardari but number one Zardari is probably the most astute politician in Pakistan he has gotten out of more jams than I don't know probably you face today and you're on your way in the Beltway and I think second you know corruption is like the perpetual sort of Damocles in Pakistan it's it's what is over every hanging over everybody's head and so I think that the parties have a way of operating within those constraints in a way that still allows them to maintain their their political interests in other words I'm not sure Zardari is all that troubled by it so I'll just say a little bit about the effect of the democratic transitions and so what that means especially from the voter side right so theoretically the expectation of being held to account by election should change politicians both time horizons and their incentives on the voter side kind of what we saw in this election anecdotally was just sort of more instances of voters really taking their politicians to account right so there was this one particular anecdote from a politician going to his constituency and the voter sort of just getting really attacked by the voters and and then he gets super defensive and he says well you know I gave you this road and the voters want no democracy gave me this road and so this is like the it's it's a it's a stylized anecdote but I think it's sort of testament to how voters expectations of their politicians are higher and the and the ability to sort of take them to task at the elections it has it's it's particularly meaningful for voters and we sort of see this in the case of India as well where there's sort of you know there's there's always talk about how there's extensive vote buying in certain in certain areas or regions or constituencies but there's there's also the pushback that actually you know voters will sort of take the goodies from every politician and party and then vote exactly how they please at the ballot box so this sort of change in the power that the voter has with respect to the politician is I think one of the products that we can expect from repeated democratic transitions on what Sarah just said so on the candidate side and on the party side the the effect of the the two democratic transitions has been that I think political parties are realizing that they have to invest in their local party organizations because unless they do that they're always going to be reliant on electable candidates and I think moving forward political parties have become conscious of the fact that they cannot actually have a majority of electable candidates as opposed to their own party people in parliament because it makes governance a lot more difficult and I think political parties are beginning to understand this not that they've done anything to change that impression just yet I don't think 2018 was the election for that maybe in another five years maybe in another 10 years but I think that behavior is starting to change you had a question about the difference in the processes in the provincial versus national level candidate selection there's actually no difference because the selector it's the same right so it's the same body of people who actually nominate in in in both PMLN so PMLN this is very interesting PMLN's constitution actually says that there should be a provincial parliamentary board for the provincial seats and a central parliamentary board for the for the national assembly seats and even though these parliamentary boards are put into place the ultimate decision is made by the central parliamentary board on which the party leader is an ex-official member right whereas the chief minister is the ex-official member of the provincial parliamentary board chief minister I said because PMLN was in power when I did this candidate selection now so my point being that formal processes that are written out in the constitution are not necessarily followed for a party like MQM it is the RAPTA committee it's just the central coordination committee of the MQM which which makes the selection and prior to this election it was actually Altaf Hussein not even the RAPTA committee right so so there is absolutely no difference the PTI however in in in KP yes it was in power and when it did its candidate selection it did exactly what PMLN did most of its candidates are repeat candidates so candidates which were successful in 2013 were issued tickets even though there was a lot of news about how Shariah Afridi is not going to be given a ticket and another candidate I think his name was I don't I'm Ali Muhammad thank you thank you Ali Muhammad is not going to get a ticket he also got his ticket eventually right so my point being that they that PTI went with the tried and tested so I don't think their candidate selection procedures were any different even though constitutionally PTI has the best candidate selection procedures so formally PTI is set up for success but it does not follow the follow those procedures so in theory the more democratic it sounds like potentially the more democratic transitions we have the fewer floor crosses we should have because parties are incentivized to reward winners right well we're likely to see more candidate incumbency I think maybe because that's what we've seen in these two elections but I'm not 100 percent certain because I like Colin have not actually calculated this figure just yet but I think political parties will mature in their candidate selection in that they might take loyalty and party affiliation a bit more seriously than they have in the past because local party organization and the wishes of the electorate will matter far more in the candidate selection decision than just the record of delivering services by the candidate which has been the case for the longest time so that might start to change we I mean prediction none of us are in the business of prediction hi thanks again for putting this together I'm so you know impressed by this panel my name is Aram I'm over at Georgetown Georgetown I'm in my fifth year in the PhD program there and I came back like I think two or three days right after the elections and somebody costs me in the hallway and is like what do you feel about your elections and I said as a voter I'm not really sure but as a political scientist I am super excited at all the data we have and I and I really and I want to take this point seriously because we're all geeks over here right this is a panel of of nerds right and so I one thing I want to say is from my own survey that we just did voters are playing their cards really close to the chest I asked about a thousand people how they're going to vote how they voted previously how they're voting next time and the one the largest category for me was the don't know not sure a full 30 to 40 percent are telling me they just and this is like a week before the election they're still not sure how they're going to vote maybe they're not telling my interviewers we give them the option of a secret you know we you'd hand over those electronic tabs to them and let them pick on the way they would on a ballot paper and still there were a lot of people who did not answer and I wonder if that came out in your kind of looking at the polling exit polls and things like that so I think that there is one lesson that I feel like we're learning is that there is a massive push for more transparency I think as Sarah really nicely pointed out that the De Jura institutions are not a panacea we're not going to start seeing but in some ways they're pushing for change this 10 percent thing might have unintended consequences down the road which we cannot anticipate India experimented with having randomized female requirement for female leadership at the local level and it just implemented that like I don't know how it happened I don't know how the parties read that consequence right and we you know read about this but it had you know ester du flow and other people have talked about how when you force women to take that seed the agenda shifts decision-making shifts you know instead of like instead of saying that look we're not sure whether this 10 percent is doing enough sure it's probably not but isn't that just a case to do more and to have more of these institutions in place and the one thing I found and I'm wondering if you guys are seeing this as well the party weakness is actually having the unintended consequence of making some transparency and actually weirdly the bureaucracy stronger right so another thing that somebody asked me is that why were constituencies redrawn in a way that actually make more sense now they're much more rational provincial assembly constituencies overlap with national assembly constituencies almost perfectly for the first time at least in Karachi how did the MQM the PPP and every other stakeholder allow this to happen over their own incentive of gerrymandering and I think the I had the answer is they're in total disarray so no one is strong enough to push or pull in one direction but that's exactly how institutions develop right so I wonder if you could speak to some of like the long-term long-term potential of what we are seeing now just in terms of institutions the bureaucrats the census you know we haven't spoken about that like how are these things going to end up in the long term do you do you think thanks hi I'm Shariah Fuzzley I'm a political analyst based in Pakistan my question is for Sahar the elephant in the room when it comes to extra parliamentary opposition tactics is always the military whether it's acting as a umpire or in part an instigator so I was just wondering if you had thoughts about how parties can resort to extra parliamentary tactics even if their demands are legitimate and but avoid the risk of it getting hijacked in a way that undermines civilian authority which essentially affects everybody and therefore whether that has an impact on your assessment of the value of extra parliamentary opposition thank you good morning I'm Stuart Davis I'm with your noisy neighbors across the street with the State Department the conflict and stabilization operations I'm new to Pakistani politics and I thought maybe this question from Merriam would be best in reading before this event I kept coming across the term defections of parties was that brought up in the literature again and again obviously that happens in all politics including here was that because it's not done in Pakistani politics is it a new sort of ugly sinister turn or is it a sign of future instability and sort of a sign of a weak parliamentary system why is that noted again and again thank you who wants to go first you want to go first um so uh Erum brought up a lot of good points and um I'll pick up on her specific point on sort of what the successful institutional design for women's representation look like right and um she brought up the example of the Indian quotas which are the the important thing to note about those is that they're A at the local level so these are um at the village leadership and shy at level um the second thing to note is that they are um they're designed on a different way from seat quotas as well as from party list quotas they're actually reservations of a local level constituency so what that means is that um against that a random set of local level constituencies is assigned to have a woman as the head of the village council or panchayat and so what that means is that parties then field can field only women candidates in that election so it's an election of women running against women um and that's something that has positive implications for a number of reasons which is that an election of um of women running against women sort of builds um experience for a number of women candidates um having a woman directly elected has means that she has then direct ties with a local level constituency because it's at the local level the barriers to entry are significantly lower than they would be for a national or provincial level um and so in Pakistan I think um what Maryam pointed out about parties recognizing the need for having um strong local level organization is a really important one and um what we can sort of hope for is that there's going to be impetus for reforming the local government structure um in um in this party's term and so when there's sort of the opening for reform is also hopefully when there can be an opportunity for some of these like experimenting with different types of institutional design to improve women's representation at a local level where the barriers are lower and here sort of India's design is a really good example and something that I think can be pretty easily implemented um so I I'll stop there and let the others take up on the rest of Erin's points I'm just gonna um answer the question how did parties let the gerrymandering happen so I don't think anybody let anything happen because in April when the when the delimitation was being made public and candidates were finding out the nature of personalized politics in Pakistan meant that candidates freaked out right it wasn't the political parties it was the candidates and I remember at that time that I could barely could scarcely get any interviews with any of the politicians because well they were all at the election commission of Pakistan and were really really scared to talk to me because they thought that the only questions I would have is about why they lost their constituency right and that's not what I was interested in but I mean there was there was a genuine fear I think uh in April and May on part of candidates not on part of political parties and the reason why political parties let it happen to quote you uh is because well they were relying on the candidates to win the seats that's what the candidate selection is all about right make sure you select the candidate who can um can win the seat for you it doesn't matter whether your local party organization has been bifurcated and you know is is on one side of the river and the other ones on the other side of the river that doesn't matter uh what what what matters is choosing the right candidate now some political party suffered as a result of that PMLN suffered um as a result of that um how much they suffered quantitatively I can't tell you but um you know I think they were affected I I also know that political parties did throw their weight behind certain individuals to make sure that they uh got a ticket from a constituency that was not necessarily their home constituency so for example in Gujjan Valam and Mood Bashir who was a law minister at the federal level the party did throw their weight behind him and he somehow magically got elected even though he lost his his home base did you see so I think it was a combination of both the party vote and the candidate vote that eventually led to the successful election of many of the repeat faces that we saw um in in the PMLN can't speak to the Karachi case as much because I don't study um uh since since politics um in in the same level of detail as I study the Punjab but um it's it's it's not a question about parties how do the candidates like I have to say Karachi is a special case because both those parties have faced military operations against them right so let's let's caveat that as well and I think you're absolutely right that the party is not strong at this point the candidates themselves were scrambling because they didn't know who was going to get a ticket right and so there was this but but the point is we now have constituencies that are regularized so we have an unintended consequence of whatever absolutely absolutely I don't disagree with the unintended consequence I just I just want to say uh it it it went through you're right the bureaucracy is strong but the political parties allow the bureaucracy to be strong and and we see that at the local government level and maybe Sarah can speak to this or maybe like uh reaffirm what I'm saying but I do think that in many instances especially in the Punjab uh the political party has turned to the bureaucracy when it didn't want to mediate itself between the union councils the district chairman and uh its party at the provincial level so you know what the parties have made the bureaucracy stronger as well I at least in my opinion um let me respond to Sharia's question yeah so briefly I think you're right obviously the military is and I alluded to this in my remarks the military is a very important extra parliamentary player and benefits some from some extra parliamentary mobilizations but not all and I would give again the example of the PMLN's involvement in the lawyer's movement which was effectively um you know to sort of push back against the militaries um ultimately against the militaries influence um I think one of the again I haven't looked at the data but one of the interesting things that I see is in successive elections is the rise of the urban middle class in Pakistan and its role and its kind of influence in electoral politics and I think that what I see long term building up is that on the one hand this problem of the allocation of resources the alliance chair of which goes to the military versus the other pressure that's building up which is voters you know Sarab talked about this uh voters want things and they are expecting that their vote is going to deliver on those things and institutionally this will take some time to kind of get you know institutionalized regularized all of that but I I at least sort of see these two twin pressures building up and they are on a collision course because those demands those needs cannot be delivered without the militaries um without the military taking a cut in resources I think I just saw recently for example the Pakistani military's pensions alone are a billion US dollars and all of its combined expenditures is now sort of putting the pressure on PTI to deliver austerity cuts in government spending which is totally at odds with at least some of its electorate demanding demanding you know infrastructure and other kinds of things and I think it'll be a really interesting sort of you know sort of scenario to play out but um yeah I'll just stop there So do you have a question about um defections um so I think I need to clarify so there's a defection which is well the same as floor crossing that you you might have a certain party identity but you vote against your party and support another political party in parliament um but that's not the the kind of defection that I was talking about yes that has happened in the past in Pakistan absolutely and I'll just get to it in a second but what I was referring to was party switching which is that right before an election after the National Assembly has been dismissed and a caretaker government is in place candidates change their party allegiance prior to an election right right so there's party switching and then of course there's defection now in Pakistan defection has a very very long history so in the 1990s it was referred to as horse trading uh and um in in in much the same way a jockey would trade his bet on the horses uh to make sure that okay well yeah that would be a little harder but um a lota is essentially what he's referring to a lota is a vessel with a rounded base so it keeps chattering right and uh this is a term that is given to politicians who keep changing the party affiliations because they well they can't stay in one place they keep they keep changing their alliances that's the best way I can explain it but um but in the 1990s defection was very very common in fact many uh no confidence motion was um uh was successfully won by the party that was facing the no confidence motion because of horse trading by by making members from other political parties defect and vote um along with it so there is a history of that now because of that history and post charter of democracy in 2006 that was signed by Navashree Fenbenazir Bhutto um a clause was inserted into the constitution it's known as the anti-defection clause which I did refer to and the anti-defection clause basically states that any individual who votes against their party leader or their political party in a no confidence motion on a budget bill and good lord one more thing create you're you're really like helping me out today sorry thank you it's like you're like my backup memory here absolutely constitutional thank you yes constitutional amendment um uh that individual would have would be set to be a defector and a party leader can issue a show cause notice to set individual now the the explanation that I gave earlier was that many party leaders don't actually do that because uh they want to keep as many of the defectors um on their side when the senate election comes but that's an institutional explanation there's other explanations for it as well but defection there's a long history of it in Pakistan uh but party switching that's what's particularly rampant and that's what Jamina's question was about when she was talking about party fragmentation prior to an election we're out of time for this panel um so we will close it here and uh thank all of our speakers and take a five minute break five to seven minutes uh and then these can reconvene to talk about the uh uh military will be one of the topics we'll be discussing along with the judiciary religious political parties among others so thank you to the panel bring right on the floor