Book Project

Book Project Title:

Being Seen By the State: Social Policy and the Politics of Poverty Relief in Pakistan

Under what conditions do states with fragmented democratic institutions, ueneven state capacity and high levels of patronage implement programmatic social policies to address poverty and inequality ? What consequences do the design and implementation of these social policies have for previously excluded citizens, who face high barriers in participating in politics and accessing the state. My book manuscript addresses these seminal political economy questions about how public policies can influence politics, by analyzing the political origins and citizenship consequences of Pakistan’s largest social safety net: The Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP), one of the largest unconditional cash transfer (UCT) programs targeted at exclusively at women in the Global South.

BISP was established in 2008, during Pakistan’s most recent and tenuous democratic transition. Over the span of a decade (2008-18), BISP has rapidly expanded social welfare coverage to over 7 million women and their households nationwide, with a goal to cover 20% of the population. The first part of the monograph examines the political origins of programmatic social policy expansion in Pakistan. The second part analyzes the effect of the BISP cash transfer on beneficiaries’ political participation and engagement with both formal and informal local governance institutions

I use a mixed methods research design, combining a variety of data sources collected during eighteen months of field research in four districts in Pakistan. This research includes a original household survey with 2254 respondents, two focus groups with BISP program recipients and 50 semi-structured qualitative interviews with politicians, bureaucrats and donor consultants involved in program design and implementation. This enabled me to conduct a process tracing of social policy expansion in Pakistan, following the transition to democracy in 2008.

This book’s central argument is that weak incumbent's in new democracies face incentives to institutionalize programmatic public policies and abandon clientelistic policies,when they face sustained pressures for reform both domestically and externally.The book documents how the dual pressures of increased political competition at the domestic level and the need for donor aid and signaling credibility, played a significant role in incentivizing three successive incumbents to build a rules-based welfare program, insulated from clientelistic political pressures. Rules-based welfare also allowed political parties to claim credit for these popular social policies.

The second part of the monograph uses household survey data leveraging a natural experiment to examine the consequences of programmatic social welfare expansion for program recipients political participation and engagement with the state. I find that receipt of a BISP cash transfer did not result in any significant increase in vote share for three successive incumbents who claimed credit for the program. Instead, i find evidence that program has helped reduce recipients reliance on traditional rural patronage institutions, such as landlords (zamindars) and informal village governance (panchayats). However, BISP’s top-down centralized implementation has created limited local forums for citizen-state linkages and claim making, indicating the limitations of programmatic cash transfers, in settings where local state presence is highly uneven. While the electoral policy feedback loops are weak, I illustrate how BISP enabled new policy feed back and learning within the Pakistani bureaucratic state on how to deliver services to excluded citizens and and improve public policies to alleviate poverty.

I conclude the monograph by placing the Pakistani case of social policy expansion in comparative perspective with three other notable welfare programs in new democracies in the Global South: India, Brazil and Mexico. My analysis of the politics of social welfare expansion in Pakistan, seeks to make an original contribution to the study of the political origins and consequences of programmatic social policy expansion, poverty alleviation and state-citizen linkages in new democracies in the Global South.