What is half of Pakistan thinking?
Women make up 44 per cent of Pakistan’s 105,955,409 registered voters for the 2018 elections. While this reflects a lower proportion than their share in the adult voting age population, more Pakistani women are registered to vote than ever before.
This is because the Election Commission of Pakistan, along with other government institutions and civil society organisations, has recently undertaken serious efforts to close the gender gap in voter registration. These initiatives were specially targeted at areas and neighbourhoods with particularly low proportions of registered women voters. Consequently, women voters’ registration has increased by an impressive 24 per cent since 2013. Men’s voter registration, meanwhile, has increased by 22 per cent.
This change took place across all provinces: there has been a 25 per cent increase in women voters’ registration in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a 27 per cent increase in Balochistan and, a slightly lower, 17 per cent increase in Sindh. Since a sizable gender gap in voter registration persists, we will need to achieve even higher rates of increase in women voters’ registration in the future to get to a gender-equal electorate.
This represents a marked change from past trends. For instance, men’s voter registration grew by 7.3 per cent between 2008 and 2013 while women’s registration only grew by 5.6 per cent in the same period.
Will registered women vote?
Voter registration is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for participation in voting. Translating registered votes into actual voter turnout at the polls depends upon personal motivation among voters, and the cost of time and travel to get to a polling station. It also requires voters to make up their minds about who to cast a vote for.
In the Herald and Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) survey conducted between June 25 and July 12 this year, respondents across Pakistan were asked if they would turn out to vote in the 2018 election. Since voting is a socially desirable behaviour, survey respondents often tend to overstate their past and future participation in voting to appear more engaged with electoral politics than they really are. Given this caveat, as many registered women voters surveyed in Punjab, Sindh and Balochistan showed strong intent to vote as registered men voters surveyed in these areas did.
A stark exception to this was seen in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa where 56 per cent of registered male voters told the surveyors that there was a ‘good’ or a ‘certain’ chance that they would turn out to vote. Compared to this, only 41 per cent of the registered female voters reported similar readiness to vote. Despite the fact that there has been an impressive increase in women voters’ registration in the province, a significant gender gap in registered voters reporting strong likelihood of their participation in voting still exists.
In 2013, women in parts of at least eight constituencies in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa were barred from casting votes. Even if such outright bans are not enforced in 2018, a continued perception that women’s lower participation is an acceptable norm has the danger of dampening their motivation to turn out to vote.