Mohsin Ali Baig2025-08-292025-08-292023https://escholar.umt.edu.pk/handle/123456789/5703Since its independence in 1947, Pakistan has struggled to attain functional form of democracy. With the wave of decolonization era, democracy in Pakistan started to gain support among the masses, but repeated military coups proved detrimental in shattering the roots of democracy. During the Cold War era, despite being the US close ally, a country generally regarded as the paragon of democracy, Pakistan was unable to transmute into functional democracy. The reemergence of democracy post Zia demise instigated hopes for a functional democracy but underlying challenges didn’t led the democratic culture to prevail as the underlying political system remained volatile and procedural. The inception of Charter of Democracy (CoD) in 2006, brought consensus among the major political parties but democratic backsliding and failure of democratic framework continued. The paper addresses the essential features of functional democracy, enlisting the conceptual and general overview on it from the context of different regions. This study has attempted to comparatively study and analyze the era of democratic confrontation (1988-99) to consensus on Charter of democracy in 2006, and has used ‘political liberalism’ to identify the underlying internal factors linked to the preeminence of procedural democracy in Pakistan.en-USThesis