People over politicians
By Niaz Murtaza

Pakistan’s first-ever smooth democratic transition has completed successfully. However, democracy must start benefiting common people concretely soon. Otherwise, the disenchantment with democracy among already sceptical Pakistanis could increase significantly.

Governance gets better as the accountability of politicians to common people increases. Political accountability is a poorly defined buzzword. In essence, it just means that people have concrete ways available to them to force politicians to prioritise common people’s interests while performing their jobs.

Management gurus identify four steps in the performance cycle of any person. In the first two steps, the person sets performance goals and then implements them. In the last two steps, the people that the performing person is accountable to (eg customers, supervisors and voters) evaluate the performance and then sanction (reward or punish) the performing person.

These four steps also apply to the performance of politicians. However, the accountability of politicians is more complicated than that of businesses or employees. Businesses must satisfy consumers who can switch to other businesses immediately if unsatisfied.

But voters evaluate and sanction politicians only after five years. Furthermore, voters, especially the poor and illiterate among them, may not have adequate information to evaluate politicians properly. Finally, manipulations during elections may not let voters punish politicians.

Thus, politicians can ignore voter preferences while doing their job since they know that the ability of voters to evaluate and negatively sanction them is weak and infrequent.

What types of mechanisms can increase people’s influence over the performance of politicians? Some mechanisms may require formal legislation by politicians themselves. Hoping that politicians will introduce such mechanisms themselves is like mice answering the question ‘who will bell the cat’ by saying that the cat should bell itself.

Obviously, neither ordinary cats nor political fat-cats will bell themselves unless forced.

Fortunately, humans possess greater ability to force politicians to bell themselves than mice have vis-à-vis cats. This is based on their ability to form formal groups known as civil society organisations (CSOs) for advancing their collective interests .

CSOs can help both in devising informal mechanisms that do not require legislation as well as mobilising public pressure to force politicians to legislate additional mechanisms that do. But they are clearly no panacea. There is strong evidence that CSOs do not always represent common people as well as they claim. However, their willingness to serve common people is still more than that of government and market players.

These civil society organisations can pursue three main strategies to enhance political accountability. Firstly, they can help organise voters by establishing community-based organisations (CBOs) in middle-class neighborhoods, villages and slums which can then work to influence politicians.

CSOs have already helped establish numerous CBOs throughout Pakistan. However, most of the latter have only been established to facilitate CSO projects within communities.

Unfortunately CSO projects alone cannot help eradicate poverty until government policies become more people-friendly. Only a few impart skills in external networking and advocacy work to the CBOs. Such skills can help the latter and voters communicate frequently with and exert pressure on politicians and government departments to adopt and implement people-friendly policies.

Other CSOs should adopt and scale up these scattered examples of good practice. They can also advocate formal legislation to get such CBOs officially recognised by governments to enhance CBO effectiveness and credibility.

Encouragingly, KP’s proposed local government law aims to establish CBOs with such roles.

Secondly, civil society organisations can educate people about having broader expectations from politicians and evaluating their performance accordingly. Pakistani voters often judge politicians solely by their ability to provide personal patronage, eg jobs for family members.

While people may not abandon such personalised expectations immediately, they can still be educated to also evaluate politicians on their willingness to adopt sound policies that advance long-term collective welfare.

Both these aims focus on increasing voters’ influence in the goal-setting, implementation and evaluation of politicians. However, true political accountability can only exist if voters also have strong sanctioning powers over politicians. The current once in five years electoral opportunity to fire incumbents is inadequate. CBOs can help generate ‘soft’ negative sanctioning by running public awareness-raising and mobilisation campaigns to shame and exert informal social pressure on poorly performing politicians and government departments.

Providing additional and/or more frequent ‘hard’ sanctioning powers over politicians to people may require legislative changes.

Such changes could include shortening the term of the assemblies to four years; having special ‘recall’ election options where parliamentarians could be fired even before regular elections if their constituents so vote; and having referenda options on matters of great public interest.

CSOs and CBOs can play an important role in initiating dialogue around the feasibility of such options within society. Finally, they can also advocate for improving future electoral processes in light of the weaknesses highlighted by the 2013 elections.

To draw parallels with economics, elections and assemblies merely represent macro-politics. It must be underpinned by vigorous micro-politics as described above.

Pakistanis have a strong interest in politics, as reflected by the vast amount of time they spend discussing it in offices, homes and social events. Some of this time must be spent instead on collective community work that strengthens Pakistani micro-politics. Only then will governance improve gradually.

The writer is a political economist at the University of California, Berkeley.

murtazaniaz@yahoo.com