electoral principle of democracy is foundational, aligning with the views of
Freedom House and Polity V. Despite the similarities, Freedom House
requirements for democracy are broader, acknowledging the influence of state
and non-state actors (Freedom House, 2023). This means the validity of
freedom house is stronger because it includes more attributes to justify a
country as an electoral democracy, but the reliability of Polity V and Freedom
House can be questioned because of coder subjectivity. Replicability of Polity V
is stronger than freedom house because they provide more detailed coding rules
(Clark et al. 2017). Although Polity V has classed Pakistan as a democracy, we
have demonstrated how the minimalist approach to democracy measures is
insufficient in judging a country and a wider context needs to be provided, as by
Freedom House, to assess a state's true nature. Therefore, Pakistan is assessed as
a mixed regime, an anocracy; it has elements of democratic and autocratic
regimes.
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