Description
Bureaucratic staffing is key to managing state performance and service delivery (Hassan 2021; McDonnell 2020; Brierley 2020). But we know less about why and how politicians and bureaucrats in tutelary hybrid regimes with distorted parliamentary systems seek to regulate bureaucratic appointments, though it has great significance for bureaucratic and party politics, variations in capacity within such states, and the persistence of such regimes.
This paper sets out the theoretical foundations of a book project on bureaucratic politics in Pakistan, drawing on data from interviews, semi-participant observation, and newspaper archives. In a tutelary hybrid regime, how do politicians and bureaucrats improve their access to state resources and direct public goods to favoured constituencies? What are the regime implications of their actions? I develop a theory of the use of civil service appointments by both politicians and bureaucrats as a means of achieving political (but not just electoral) outcomes to counter regime uncertainty by regulating access to, and distribution of, state resources and services, bureaucratic performance, and patronage – but with varying success. My findings have implications for contexts beyond Pakistan in developing our understanding of how elites manage regime uncertainty while at the same time entrenching arbitrary patterns of governance that hinder democratic transition.
