Religion, Personality Politics, and Issue Voting in Peripheral Pakistan: Explaining the Divergent Electoral Behavior of District Lakki Marwat in the 2018 General Elections

Abstract

In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) swept the entire province in the 2018 General Elections, except the district of Lakki Marwat in the southern belt of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa where the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) kept its National Assembly seat and two of its three provincial assembly seats. This article examines the reasons for the consistent voting patterns of Lakki Marwat (LM) in the three elections of 2008, 2013 and 2018, contrary to the provincial trends. The study examines the explanatory power of four theories of voting behavior (party identification, issue voting, religious voting, and personality or candidate-centered voting) in a rural, conservative Pakhtun district, based on an institutionalized, structured survey of voters (N = 1,122), an additional attitudinal survey component (N = 613), interviews with sitting and retired members of parliament, and election results from the district level for the period of 1988-2018. Chi-square analyses show that there are statistically significant relationships between vote motivation and gender, age, profession, income, education and region. Three things are noteworthy. First, religion is a strong determinant: for respondents in the south, the desire for an ‘Islamic system' is the second most important single factor, and the religious parties' network of madrassas and mosques translates religiosity into lasting partisanship. Second, electoral competition is structured around a few dynastic families—in particular the Saifullah brothers—who through their patronage, offer of jobs and involvement in communal rituals (gham-khadi) elicit personality-based voting across party lines. Thirdly, issue voting is of a hyper local and clientelistic nature based on water, electricity and vote buying etc., and not based on programme oriented issues at the national level. The article suggests that in Lakki Marwat religious voting and personality voting have combined to dampen party-identification and programmatic-issue dynamics, which reshaped the rest of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2013 and 2018, and it has implications for the study of electoral behaviour in Pakistan's peripheral districts.