Constitutional Reforms and Political Stability: A Study of the 18th Amendment

Abstract

The 2010 amendment of the Constitution of Pakistan, which introduced the Eighteenth Amendment, is widely seen as a landmark change that fundamentally changed the balance of power between the federation and the provinces by removing the Concurrent Legislative List, increasing the degree of provincial legislative and administrative autonomy, reinforcing parliamentary institutions, and redefining intergovernmental mechanisms (e.g., Council of Common Interests, National Finance Commission). There is scholarly and policy debate whether these reforms improved democratic consolidation and political stability by increasing provincial ownership, or whether they divided national policymaking, weakened federal capacity and coordination (particularly in security and macro-fiscal management) and created new governance risks. This paper looks at how 18 th Amendment and political stability are related. It is a combination of (a) qualitative institutional analysis of the design of the Amendment and its institutional practice post-2010 based on constitutional texts, policy reports, and secondary literature, and (b) an illustrative quantitative panel analysis of the provincial level projecting the short-to-medium-term association of the Amendment with a measure of political-stability, controlling by GDP per capita, fiscal transfers, and security incidents. In the empirical section, it is based on a fixed-effects specification that isolates change of within-province changes before and after 2010. The model figure demonstrates that a post-18th period and measured political stability have a positive but statistically insignificant relationship, which means that the net impact of decentralization on political stability is conditional on the implementation, intergovernmental coordination and security dynamics. The paper concludes that the 18 th Amendment produced a democratic breakthrough but that it would be required to enhance intergovernmental institutions (CCI, NFC processes), fiscal coordination, and coordinated security and provision of public goods. Policy recommendations are related to institutional change, fiscal rules and capacity building.