Politician–Bureaucrat Relationships in Pakistan’s Tutelary Hybrid Regime

Democratic backsliding has received increasing attention over the last decade, particularly with respect to democratic erosion in liberal democracies. Backsliding in other regime contexts has received less attention, and the literature has not sufficiently investigated the nuances of relationships between politicians and bureaucrats in such settings, nor their influence on processes of intra-regime change. I argue the literature on backsliding is shaped by Western democratic values and notions of bureaucracies being neutral and non-partisan, drawing on interpretations of Weber (1978), leading to an emphasis on executive aggrandisement targeting civil servants but little attention to bureaucratic politics. Drawing on the case of Pakistan, a tutelary hybrid regime with a recent history of backsliding, I contend that understanding the nature of personalised relationships between politicians and bureaucrats is crucial to understanding democratic backsliding. While tutelary or military intervention in politics and governance impacts public administration by capturing civilian domains of governance, it is political and bureaucratic relationships and the contextually interpreted values they embody that capture the realities of governance and politics in postcolonial states like Pakistan. While this chapter is focused on a single case and does not seek to identify causal relationships between backsliding and politician–bureaucrat relationships, it offers insight into how democratic quality and public administration might be related in hybrid regimes in other countries. More broadly, this chapter makes the case for advancing our understanding of the roles and interactions of politicians and bureaucrats beyond mainstream Eurocentric approaches.