Mariam Mufti is an associate professor of political science at the University of Waterloo. Her research focuses on the role of the military and political parties in the processes of recruitment and candidate-selection of the political elite in Pakistan as a way to understand the behaviour of political leadership and regime dynamics. She uses Pakistan as a case-study to address the dearth of analysis on how politics actually works in hybrid regimes. By proposing to treat hybrid regimes not as a transitional state or a defective democracy, she examines the recruitment and selection of the elite—a new lens with which to examine how the fundamental coalitions of power underpinning the regime are structured. Based on this research, her book manuscript entitled Accessing Political Power and Democratization in Pakistan is under contract at Palgrave Macmillan in its book series on the Politics of South Asia. An edited volume, Pakistan’s Political Parties: Surviving between Dictatorship and Democracy (Georgetown University Press, 2020; Folio Books, 2021), (co-edited with Niloufer Siddiqui and Sahar Shafqat) also emerged from this research agenda.
