Electoral Politics and Neoliberal Choices
Electoral politics has long been celebrated as the pinnacle of democratic expression, the space where the will of the people is translated into policy choices. Yet, as history reveals, the relationship between voters’ choices and the economic models that shape their lives is neither transparent nor emancipatory. From mercantilism to Keynesianism, and finally into the deep grip of neoliberalism, electoral systems have continuously absorbed, reshaped, and legitimized dominant economic paradigms. What appears as the sovereign will of the median voter often masks structural coercion, ideological hegemony, and class power embedded within the state apparatus. In the twenty-first century, especially in contexts like Pakistan, the puzzle of how voters’ aspirations for dignity and livelihood are converted into neoliberal policies that further entrench inequality requires a critical unpacking. To understand this trajectory, we must trace the arc of economic thought and its political sedimentation. In the mercantilist age, beginning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, states across Europe conceived wealth as accumulation of bullion, colonies, and monopolies. The political order was tightly bound with imperial expansion. Mercantilism laid the groundwork for an intimate marriage between state and capital. Citizens had no formal electoral role, yet the economic system was designed to serve the merchant class and nascent bourgeoisie while legitimizing political authority. This is where Marx’s insights ring true: the state was never a neutral arbiter, but the executive committee of the bourgeoisie, ensuring the expansion of capital at the expense of subaltern populations both at home and in the colonies.
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the rise of liberal economic thought. Adam Smith’s invisible hand and Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage articulated as emancipatory alternatives to mercantilist monopolies. Yet, as Gramsci would remind us, such paradigms achieved hegemony not merely through coercion but by shaping common sense. In Britain, for instance, the liberal doctrine of free trade was enshrined as a moral order, while in reality it secured the dominance of British industrial capital over India and the colonies. France followed similar patterns, couching colonial plunder in the language of enlightenment and liberty. The birth of electoral representation in these contexts allowed the bourgeoisie to frame their interests as universal interests. Workers, peasants, and women remained outside the system or were integrated into it through compromises that never threatened the reproduction of capital. The Keynesian revolution in the mid-twentieth century is often portrayed as a rupture. In the United States, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal embodied a class compromise: the working class secured welfare, unions, and public works, while capital retained control over the commanding heights of the economy. Western Europe, devastated by war, constructed welfare states that expanded education, healthcare, and housing. Australia, too, developed strong welfare protections within a parliamentary democratic framework. For a brief period, electoral politics seemed to reflect social compromise and redistribution. Yet, the Keynesian era was bounded by the Cold War and the global division between North and South. The Global South, including Pakistan, was drawn into developmentalism, an economic doctrine promising industrialization and modernization through state planning, foreign aid, and import-substitution industrialization. In Pakistan’s electoral history, from Ayub Khan’s “basic democracies” to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s populist socialism, the rhetoric of redistribution gained traction. Bhutto’s slogan of roti, kapra aur makaan resonated with the subaltern masses who desired dignity and basic needs. Yet structural dependence on global capital and military-bureaucratic elites undermined these redistributive projects. The unraveling of Keynesianism in the 1970s was not merely economic but deeply political. Rising inflation, stagflation, and fiscal crises opened the door for neoliberal thought—championed by Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and later institutionalized through Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Neoliberalism promised efficiency, deregulation, and market freedom, but in reality, as David Harvey has argued, it functioned as a class project to restore the power of economic elites. Electoral politics became the terrain through which neoliberal hegemony was naturalized. In the United States, the so-called Reagan Democrats, working-class voters disillusioned with welfare politics—gravitated toward neoliberal candidates who promised moral order while dismantling the very institutions that had sustained them. In the UK, Thatcher successfully constructed a new common sense that demonized unions and glorified entrepreneurial freedom. France, despite its revolutionary tradition, embraced neoliberal reforms under Mitterrand after initial flirtations with socialism. Australia, too, under Labor governments, shifted toward deregulation, privatization, and financial liberalization. The median voter, trapped between fear of instability and seduced by the rhetoric of individual freedom, was co-opted into legitimizing neoliberal projects through electoral choices.
Pakistan’s trajectory must be situated in this global context. After Bhutto’s fall, General Zia-ul-Haq’s dictatorship integrated neoliberal reforms under the guise of Islamization. Structural Adjustment Programs in the 1980s and 1990s tied Pakistan’s economy to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Successive democratic governments, Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif, Pervez Musharraf’s technocratic military rule, and even the post-2008 civilian governments—have all endorsed neoliberal orthodoxy. Privatization of state-owned enterprises, liberalization of trade, cuts in subsidies, and the hollowing out of social welfare have been presented as inevitable, as if no alternative exists. Electoral manifestos promise relief, but once in power, governments reproduce the neoliberal agenda. This is the Gramscian puzzle: how the common sense of neoliberalism becomes hegemonic, transforming people’s demands for bread, work, and shelter into policy choices that deepen precarity.
The subaltern in Pakistan including peasants, laborers, informal workers, and women remain outside the corridors of power. Their electoral participation is mediated by kinship, patronage, and coercion. Yet, even when they vote for change, as in the case of Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf in 2018—the promise of a “New Pakistan” quickly collapses into neoliberal reforms dictated by global financial institutions. The IMF’s conditionalities override electoral mandates, revealing that the sovereignty of voters is circumscribed by global capital. The median voter’s choice is not free; it is structured by debt, dependency, and the ideological apparatus of neoliberalism propagated by media, universities, and international organizations. Here, Althusser’s notion of ideological state apparatus intersects with Gramsci’s hegemony, the people are taught to desire what oppresses them.
The global North and South comparison reveals the unevenness of neoliberalism’s impact. In the North, welfare states have been hollowed but not entirely dismantled; in the South, fragile welfare systems have been crushed under the weight of austerity. In Pakistan, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), ostensibly a universal framework for equity and sustainability, collide with the neoliberal order. Health and education budgets are cut to service debt, climate change adaptation is sacrificed to privatization schemes, and gender equality initiatives are reduced to donor-driven projects without structural change. The pursuit of SDGs under neoliberal austerity is paradoxical. Pakistan cannot achieve them while trapped in cycles of dependency and electoral politics that ratify neoliberalism as the only path.
Electoral politics in Pakistan functions as a mechanism to reproduce class dominance. The bourgeoisie, aligned with global financial capital, ensures that whichever party wins, neoliberalism persists. Gramsci helps us see how this is sustained by ideological hegemony, media discourses of efficiency, corruption, and modernization obscure class struggle. The subaltern perspective reveals the silenced voices of those most affected like farmers displaced by climate change, women burdened by unpaid care work, urban informal workers living without rights. Their electoral participation is real, yet their choices are mediated and distorted. As Henry Giroux warns, democracy under neoliberalism becomes a spectacle, a hollow ritual where citizens vote but have little control over their futures.
The puzzle of median voter choices turning into neoliberal choices is resolved not by blaming voters but by exposing the structural coercion of global capitalism. In Pakistan, electoral history shows that promises of redistribution. Bhutto in the 1970s, Khan in 2018 are quickly absorbed into neoliberal orthodoxy once in power. This is not simply betrayal; it is the logic of a dependent capitalist state integrated into the world system. The challenge for Pakistan is immense, how to reclaim politics from neoliberalism, how to articulate subaltern voices into genuine alternatives, and how to align electoral democracy with the pursuit of SDGs in a way that is not subordinated to debt and austerity. Neoliberalism is not destiny; it is hegemony. As Gramsci reminds us, hegemony is never complete, always contested. The cracks are visible—in protests, in grassroots movements, in demands for climate justice, in the struggles of workers and peasants. The task is to transform these into counter-hegemonic projects that challenge not only the electoral spectacle but the very economic order that underpins it. For Pakistan, this means reimagining democracy beyond the ballot box, linking it to food security, health, education, climate resilience, and dignity for all. Only then can the cycle of voters’ choices being hijacked into neoliberal outcomes be broken.
