of the respondents approached local officials for education and health matters. Clearly, this suggests that increased proximity and greater accessibility of policy-makers does not necessarily imply that pressures for improving social service delivery increase; it may imply that while elected officials may be less able to shirk their responsibilities to their respective constituencies, they may also be consumed by satisfying the personal demands of voters, or demands for improving physical infrastructure.

# _Electoral accountability_

As discussed, an argument against local government accountability is that local government elections may not be as competitive as national elections, due either to relatively lower citizen interest and media coverage, or elite capture. The competitiveness of local government elections can be examined along three dimensions: a) voter turnout; b) the level of contestation (percent of seats filled by contest between 2 or more candidates); and c) level of partisan politics, or the number of independent candidates who win relative to candidates who are affiliated with political parties. The first two indicators are almost self-evident — the higher the voter turnout and the greater the level of contest for individual seats, the more ‘representative’ a candidate. With regards to the third indicator — partisan affiliation — it can be argued that intensity of election campaigns is likely to be higher when political parties are involved as opposed to when independent candidates are contesting, primarily because candidates affiliated with political parties have greater resources at their disposal for their campaign. Partisan politics is also likely to impact the first two indicators and lead to a higher voter turnout and greater contestation.

As Figure 3, left panel shows, voter turnout in union council elections in Pakistan has been higher than national elections — for example, their was a 48% turnout in the 2005 local government elections, as compared to a 42% turnout in the 2002 national assembly elections — indicating that citizens are if anything more interested in local issues than national ones. Turnout varied considerably across the provinces, from a high of 54% in Punjab to a low of 31% in Balochistan, but was in all provinces higher than the turnout in the national elections.

The level of contestation, with one notable exception, has also been considerable. In Punjab, Sindh, and NWFP in only 6%, 12%, and 11% respectively of the seats in the 2005 elections were candidates returned unopposed (Figure 3, right panel). By contrast, in the Balochistan local government elections of 2001 almost 40% of the union council seats were uncontested, a number far higher than in any election at the national or provincial level, and reflected the fact that in many cases the elections were managed up front by tribal elders with the aim of ensuring adequate representation of most of the sub-tribes and clans that were politically important in the district. The 2005 elections appear to have been more competitive, with the number of uncontested seats in the province declining to 17%.

Political parties are by law not allowed to participate in local government elections, and candidates have to compete on an individual capacity. However, in reality the vast majority of candidates in the local elections belonged to one or another of the established political parties, and the resources of these parties were, again with the notable exception of some districts in Balochistan, utilized in the campaigns (World Bank 2004). The nature of local partisan politics appears to be quite similar to that at the provincial level — in the districts of Punjab for example, traditional patron-client or factional politics based on _biraderis_ (patrilineal networks) were the main basis for political mobilization (Cheema and Mohmand 2005).

The indirect election of the district and tehsil nazim implies that the relative competitiveness of union council elections does not automatically translate into the electoral accountability of these 7