ABSTRACT
Authoritarian, transitional, and, more lately, hybrid are some of the terms often used to describe Pakistan's political system. This chapter reviews the recent literature on persistent class inequality in Pakistan's political economy. It provides an overview of the structural changes taking place over the past three decades, which have contributed to the transformation of Pakistan's class structure. The chapter then focuses on eight months of fieldwork in the country's second largest city, Lahore, to provide empirical insight into the politics of the bazaar class, and the societal processes through which class power and domination is produced and preserved. It reviews prospects of substantive democratization and broader representation in the country's power structure. In large parts of the global South, political inequality in both procedurally democratic and authoritarian regimes is explained by the persistence of patronage politics and clientelism. It is not misplaced to suggest that Pakistan's urban reality, both in big metropolitan centers.
