Voting on infrastructure

These days the PML-N is busy wooing voters with bullet trains and motorways. And while the MQM does not have an aggressive election campaign, its devotees are quick to tout the bridges and flyovers they built in Karachi under the regime of General Musharraf.
Marketing gimmicks like these are not confined to these two parties; many parties do it and many have done it before. This is so, because the folklore of infrastructure sells, and on the face of it there is no reason why it should not.
Economic history suggests that building roads and bridges have helped countries out of recession - the US being one of the prime examples in the last century. Roads and efficient transport solutions help connect towns, increase information symmetry, provides access to markets and sows the seeds of travel economy amongst a host of other positive spillovers.
But focussing solely on physical or hard infrastructure misses the whole point; its like having a body without a soul.
Physical or hard infrastructure pertains to facilities like energy infrastructure such as dams, transport (including roads, trains etc), warehousing, communication and other tangible or visible elements. But this physical infrastructure is hardly of good use without the institutional and organisational factors - also called the soft infrastructure.
Soft infrastructure includes institutions of effective governance, well functioning financial systems, healthcare and educational institutions, as well as cultural institutions of museums, libraries and ancillary elements. Then there is organisational infrastructure which relates to organisational and managerial capacities to ensure that the institutional and physical infrastructure delivers.
The reason why political parties in Pakistan mostly boast about the physical infrastructure is because thats where they have mainly focused on - aside from their main area of interest: corruption.
Hard infrastructure is indeed the easiest to provide and gets parties the most mileage. The other two kinds - institutional and organisational infrastructure - are difficult to achieve for most of Pakistans political parties because they require a certain vision, hard work and some patience to last the gestation period.
Developing soft infrastructure may also require taking some politically difficult decisions, by ignoring populist and nepotistic pressures - something which the parties, including those reigning under military regimes, have not been inclined to ignore.
As voters head to polls on Saturday, they would be well-advised to re-examine the parties in the light of the soft infrastructure parties have developed or promise to develop. Hard infrastructure lasts a few years; soft infrastructure, a century.