Electorate's youth bulge.

PAKISTAN'S electorate of over 124 million voters reflects the youthful demographic profile of the country, among the youngest in the world. Sixty-four per cent of the population is under 30 years. Around 47pc of the electorate is between the ages of 18 and 35. A third of total registered voters is under 30. This pronounced youth bulge among voters has transformed the electoral landscape with important implications for politics, political parties and elections.

But this has mostly been an understudied factor in recent years, save for Pildat's ongoing work on youth and Gallup Pakistan's 2021 report, which assesses exit polls over the years. UNDP's Pakistan National Human Development Report of 2017 was the most comprehensive examination of the role of youth in human development, that captured the aspirations and expectations of young people. For Adil Najam, co-author of the report, its main political conclusion was that Pakistan's political culture will be defined in future by the young, and not its elites.

Young voters are a potential game changer who can transform the country's traditional voting patterns. Elections in coming years can be decided by young voters, who are a sizeable constituency - almost 58m in the 18-35 age group. This benefits parties that appeal to the young. PTI is ahead in this game. PML-N and PPP lag behind, even though the latter, in its earlier decades, enjoyed strong support among students. Both parties seem complacent about their 'stable' vote banks, which may explain their lack of outreach to the young. They need to rise above the weight of traditional politics and dial their clocks to 2022 to attract young voters.

A big unknown is whether the young would vote differently than older voters, which is presumed to be largely on the basis of traditional loyalties, personalities, dynastic politics, patronage considerations, ethnicity, biradari alignments or religious reasons. Evidence from other countries shows that voting patterns of youth are different. If they vote differently here, that could be a real game changer. Successive opinion surveys show inflation and unemployment to be young people's top concerns. So is the quality of education, honest and responsive government and religious extremism. In a recent survey, Voice of Youth, Pildat asked members of a nationally representative 'youth parliament' it regularly convenes what inspired them to support a political party. Thirty-eight per cent cited a party's past...