Institute of Development Studies

Shandana Mohmand

Shandana's research is focused on the empirical analysis of the impact of colonial history, political reforms and informal institutions on voting behaviour, socio-economic inequality and the politics of public service delivery in rural Punjab, Pakistan. Her past work has concentrated on analysing Pakistan's decentralisation reforms in terms of accountability structures and in terms of their impact on public service delivery, political participation, and socio-economic inequality. The bulk of her current work concentrates on a comparative analysis of informal local governance structures and non-state political actors at the village level in India and Pakistan. Her work uses a combination of methodologies that include social network analysis, ethnographies, archival research, GIS mapping, along with regression and case study analysis. She has also conducted policy research for ADB, DFID, CIDA, and the UNDP Human Development Report Office.

Shandana's doctoral dissertation uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to analyse the impact of socio-economic inequality on the voting behaviour of rural citizens in one district of Punjab, Pakistan. Using an original dataset of 2000 households, she explores how rural citizens vote through the formation of vote blocs, measured through a Vote Bloc Index, and finds that there is wide variation in voting behaviour in rural Pakistan that is correlated to historical and socio-economic variables. Despite this variation, she finds that on the whole, and contrary to popular belief, Pakistani rural citizens are not dependent voters, but rather, they strategize ties of patronage in order to gain access to a distant state with weak capacity and unstable political parties. She also use previous studies conducted in this district to consider how this behaviour has changed over time.

Research interests: Informal institutions, voting behaviour, colonial land history, socio-economic inequality

Languages: English (fluent), Urdu/Hindi (native), Pushto (native), Portuguese (basic), Punjabi (basic).