Pakistan’s seventy-eight yearlong tumultuous history is replete with crises of regime legitimacy and instability. Pakistan was carved out of the Indian subcontinent on August 14, 1947, and since then it has experienced four military coups encompassing nearly thirty-five years of its sovereign existence. In 1956, 1962, and 1973 three different constitutions were ratified, each attempting to shift the fulcrum of power from the prime minister to the president. The last and current constitution adopted in 1973 gives Pakistan its federal, parliamentary institutional design. However, numerous amendments to the constitution have often resulted in undemocratic outcomes. It took Pakistan twenty-three years after independence to hold its first general election in 1970. Since then, it has held eleven more electoral contests, both partisan and non-partisan, that have all been tainted by accusations of electoral rigging. Arguably the most studied source of political instability in Pakistan has been the competition between a state elite composed of the military-bureaucratic oligarchy and a political elite that is composed of political parties and their leaders. The dominance of the military-bureaucratic oligarchy directly (during periods of martial law) or indirectly (by manipulating civilian state institutions from the sidelines) has led to the concentration of power in the executive at the expense of legislative and judicial autonomy. Moreover, the inability of the courts to uphold rule of law and of the parliament to conduct oversight has resulted in undemocratic and corrupt politics. Yet how Pakistan’s political regime operates, that is how political power is distributed within the polity and within the political elites, is not very well understood. Through a detailed study of political parties in Pakistan, focused on the process of recruitment and candidate selection as a crucial component of elite formation, this book proposes to fill this gap in the scholarship.