From biradari to party gatekeeping: Institutional design and women's electoral representation in Punjab's Local Governments

Abstract

Pakistan's Devolution of Power Plan set aside one-third of every local council seat for women. The elections held under it, in 2001 and again in 2005, put tens of thousands of women into elected office in Punjab alone. Thirteen years later the Punjab Local Government Act 2013 cut that share to roughly fifteen per cent of a union council, and it changed something less visible at the same time: reserved seats would no longer be filled by voters but by the councillors whom voters had just elected. Polling under the new Act took place in 2015. This article asks what those two decisions did to the terms on which women entered local councils and worked inside them. The study is documentary. I read the two statutes, the election rules attached to them, and the published research on both against a coding frame built from feminist institutionalism and political opportunity structure theory, and organised around five questions: what opening the law created, who decided which woman filled it, to whom she answered afterwards, what the seat let her do, and what happened if the rule was ignored. Three of those five axes shifted sharply between the regimes. Two did not shift at all. Under both statutes the reserved seat carried no budget of its own and no guaranteed committee place. What changed was the shape of the exclusion, not its effect.