Political inclination is strongly affected by socio-economic inequality and patron-client voting. Increasing female literacy has a spillover benefit as it encourages women to participate in the electoral sphere.
These observations have been made in a study, "Barriers to entry in the electoral sphere for the poor" in the Asian Development Bank report based on the census of seven villages namely Chakwal, Dir, Mardan, Muzaffargarh, Sanghar, Thatta and Toba Tek Singh.
Analysing the long route of accountability in Pakistan, a comprehensive case study of these seven villages highlights three prominent determinants of voting trends in the rural areas. It says, where socio-economic inequality is highly unequal and personality-based politics dominates, dependent village-level patron-client voting prevails. Where socio-economic inequality is low and competitive higher-tier factions dominate, we should expect independent voting to prevail. However, low level of socio-economic inequality is not an assurance for independent voting criteria alone, the third determinant says, this is also affected by prevailing political conditions with monopoly higher-tier factions and personality-based politics.
The analysis suggests that the long route of pro-poor accountability will be weak due to the reasons that poor households are likely to act as dependent voters irrespective of the type of village. This further suggests that there is greater likelihood that the votes of poor households will be discounted even if they are active in the electoral sphere.
Dominant kinship groups are more likely to vote in consultation with village-level influential. This indicates that the more localised the politics the more likely it will be dominated by a display of dominant kinship groups and village-level influential.
While the report assessing the long route of accountability in Pakistan also performed analysis of poor and women participation in electoral process in the seven villages.
Female/male participation in the villages is only 31.2percent to 57.8 percent respectively. The incidence of male and female national identity card possession also shows vast variance as female have only 47.47 percent access to NIC than that of males with 74.65 percent also explains the discrimination factor of female participation.
It further identifies the trend of poor and non-poor participation in the villages and describes in percentage of 38.37 percent non-poor and 36.42percent poor suggests that poor voters are less likely to vote.
Multivariate results suggest that within the group of voting women, literate women are 9 percent more likely to vote than illiterate women, although literate are still almost 20 percent less likely to vote compared to illiterate men.
These results strongly suggest that increasing female literacy has a spillover benefit as it encourages women to participate in the electoral sphere. Therefore, if the aim of policymakers is to increase women's participation in the electoral sphere, a medium-term goal must be to increase female literacy.
One of the other strong aspects of female participation is their belonging to dominant kinship group is supportive factor. This gives rise to their awareness by overcoming their weak participation and utilise the opportunity of limited voting run. However, it suggests that patterns of patriarchy embedded in the social structure are exogenous impediments to women's participation in the electoral process.
Apart from discrimination observed in electoral sphere regarding gender, poverty, education and kinship, the political economy literature, however, is replete with examples that suggest that the act of voting may itself be circumscribed for groups that are in relations of social and economic dependence, such as landless, tenants, and socially excluded groups.
The voting decision of these groups is defined by relations of dependence that constraint their exercise of choice when voting. They are more prone to honour the landlord expectation. However, the results vary from village to village and dependency is more seen where socio-economic parity is more.