Pakistan enters its eighth uninterrupted decade of constitutional politics with institutions that look familiar on paper and feel foreign in practice. This report is an attempt to measure that gap.

What the report covers

The 2026 Baseline is structured around five dimensions of democratic governance — the same five that will anchor the Foundation's annual flagship over the coming decade:

• Electoral integrity — pre-election environment, campaign finance, election-day administration and post-election dispute resolution, measured against the Foundation's 14-point integrity index.
• Legislative performance — bill activity, committee functioning, oversight intensity and substantive legislative quality across the National Assembly, Senate and four provincial assemblies.
• Rights protection — implementation of constitutional and statutory protections, with particular attention to access to information, civic space and minority rights.
• Service delivery — citizen-experienced quality of public services across health, education, water and sanitation, disaggregated by province and district.
• Civic space — freedoms of assembly, association and expression; the regulatory environment for civic organisations; and the safety of journalists.

How we did it

Three strands of original evidence underpin the report. First, a nationally representative survey of 8,400 respondents across 80 districts in all four provinces, AJK, Gilgit-Baltistan and the federal capital, fielded between October 2025 and February 2026. Second, 24 months of structured legislative monitoring across six legislatures. Third, a public-bodies compliance audit covering 240 institutions on RTI response performance.

The full methodology, sample design, weighting scheme and questionnaire are published in the methodology annex, alongside replication scripts and the de-identified survey micro-data.

Headline findings

The country's democratic infrastructure is more elaborate than its democratic practice — and the gap between the two is widening, not closing.

Five findings stand out from the baseline measurement:

1. Electoral integrity scores improve at the institutional level but worsen at the citizen-experience level. The ECP performs better on most procedural metrics than in 2018, but voter confidence in the fairness of the result has dropped 11 percentage points in the same period.
2. Legislative oversight has weakened across every assembly we monitored. Committee meetings are fewer, briefer, and less likely to summon the executive than at any point in the post-2008 period.
3. RTI implementation continues to outperform expectations in Punjab and KP, and underperform in Sindh and Balochistan — a four-province divergence that the report attributes to specific institutional design choices, not political environment.
4. Service-delivery satisfaction is stable in absolute terms but deeply unequal across provinces and within them. District-level disaggregation reveals service-delivery gaps that province-level averages hide.
5. Civic space is contracting, but not collapsing. The regulatory environment for civic organisations has tightened, but the underlying ecosystem remains more resilient than equivalent measures in comparable jurisdictions.

Reading the report

The report is published in a single PDF, with each dimension also available as a stand-alone chapter. A summary brief in English and Urdu accompanies the full report, along with eight data stories on specific findings.

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Citation: The Democracy and Governance Foundation (2026). State of Democratic Governance in Pakistan — 2026 Baseline. Islamabad: TDGF.