Democracy report sees Pakistan falling in rights, participation categories

KARACHI: The Global State of Democracy 2023 report has ranked Pakistan 110 out of 157 countries on its representation Index for the year 2022, moving the country one spot higher from the previous year’s 111th slot, but Pakistan has fallen one spot in the rights index category and six spots in the participation category.

The Global State of Democracy 2023 report is issued by Sweden-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA) and covers Africa, Western Asia, Americas, Asia and the Pacific, and Europe.

The report ranks countries based on four categories of democratic performance: Representation, Rule of Law, Rights and Participation.

In the Rights category, Pakistan ranked 136 out of 173 countries – one notch below its previous ranking of 135 – with Afghanistan at the bottom. The top five countries in this category were: Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, Belgium and Norway.

In the Rule of Law category, Pakistan ranked 121, an improvement of at least seven spots (it ranked 128 previously in 2021). While the report says that the most encouraging category was Participation where scores remained high even in countries with a low level of democratic performance at an institutional level, Pakistan dropped six places from its previous rank of 75, falling to 81.

The Global State of Democracy 2023 also mentions Countervailing Institutions (CIs) which the report explains “are the set of governmental and non-governmental institutions that balance the distribution of power between the branches of government and ensure that popular priorities regularly and consistently feature in decision making.”

It adds that “debt crises can act as an obstruction to the core CI of regularly scheduled elections, as has been in the case of Pakistan and Sri Lanka.”

The report says that “International economic fetters played a significant role in the 2023 political crisis in Pakistan, whose years of living on the verge of default amplified its vulnerability and hampered its response to 2022’s climate change-fuelled floods.” It adds that “the parliament that oversaw the removal of Imran Khan from the premiership in April 2022 proved no better at managing the country’s extremely distressed finances, and the ensuing political crisis spiralled out of all actors’ control by mid-2023.”

It mentions that Sri Lanka and Pakistan relied on the superior courts to uphold the right to vote in response to “executive decisions seeking to postpone local elections in 2023” and that “reliance on the judiciary as a CI is not without drawbacks. A too-strong judiciary may unintentionally undermine or destabilize the executive or parliament.” In Pakistan, says the report, the overreliance on the judiciary for democratic progress may have “paved the way for Pakistan’s 2023 constitutional crisis by weakening parliament in relation to the military.”The report concludes that the world has experienced a democratic recession for at least the past six months and democracy continues to weaken in every region of the world with declines in at least one indicator of democratic performance in half of the countries covered in the report.