INTRA-PARTY DEMOCRACY IN PAKISTAN: MYTH OR REALITY?

Abstract

A truly democratic society requires genuinely functional and representative political parties for promoting societal inclusiveness and extensiveness, public mobilization and motivated organization, arousing and stimulating participatory democracy, providing foundations for sustainable democratic institutions and linking them to the government. To maximize the benefits of participatory democracy, political parties have to articulate public needs and demands, aggregate and augment diverse political interests, train and educate political leadership as well as promote, responsibility, accountability, transparency and impart acceptability to the political system. In developed democracies, political parties channelize upward mobility, resource distribution and inclusiveness; nevertheless, in developing democracies like Pakistan, political parties are personality-centric with weak intra-party organizational structure. Lacking the real democratic culture at intra-party level sparks factionalism and fragmentation within the party since the party workers are not provided by any space for their proper elevation. Moreover, over-centralization of power in party leadership creates space for its arbitrary use and discourages the culture of internal debate and deliberation. Dynastic parties never tolerate dissident opinions and such workers are shown exit-doors. Consequently, the gap between central leadership and party workers widens which adversely affects the party in its binding, integration, functioning, and deliverance. The instant study intends to explore the causes which promote over- centralization and personality-centric political culture among political parties of developing democracies like Pakistan. The paper also examines the issues which the parties face in proper instrumentation and appliance of an internally inclusive decision-making process. The study relies on secondary resources and examines the intra-party democratic culture of three national political parties. The result shows that majority of the political parties in Pakistan has nothing with internal democratic setup and intra party elections mean nothing but to consolidate the dynastic politics.