Impact of Political Instability on Political and Socio-economic Conditions of Sindh from 1988 to 2008

Abstract

This research examines Impact of Political Instability on Political and Socio-economic Conditions of Sindh from 1988 to 2008. This study was undertaken to find out the relationship between political instability and four other dimensions (democracy, education, health, and economic development) in the province of Sindh. In this research, political instability is taken as an independent variable and democracy, education, health, and economic development as dependent variables. This study has covered a period of 20 years from 1988 to 2008. For the conduct of this study, a total of thirty colleges and Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) were selected from all the six regions (Karachi, Hyderabad, Sukkur, Larkana, Shaheed Benazirabad, and Mirpurkhas) of Sindh province of Pakistan. Five colleges were selected from each region and ten respondents were selected from each college, the total sample size was 300 out of which 264 (88%) respondents responded and returned the questionnaire duly filled by them. A five point Likert scale was constructed and administered on the participants. The responses of the respondents were analyzed using the statistical package for social sciences (SPSS), which generated the frequency distributions, means, standard deviations, coefficient of correlations and simple regression etc. of the responses. All the four hypotheses of this research which were tested at the 0.05 level of significance by using coefficient of correlation and simple regression. The major findings of this study include the association between dependent and independent variables such as: democracy and political instability, education and political instability, health and political instability and economic development and political instability. In the model of hypotheses, it was predicted that political instability has negative impact on “democracy, education, health and economic development”, in the Sindh province. At the first stage of analysis, relationship was measured through Spearman correlation coefficient analysis to check association among the variables. The model results show that all the four dimensions (democracy, education, health and economic development) correlate with political instability and found significant correlation between democracy, education, health and economic development and political instability. All the assumptions were verified and the regression model show that the variables democracy, education, health and economic development explained 97.7% of variance in total political instability. All these four exerted the highest statistically significant contribution. As per final results, all the dependent and independent variables are significantly correlated. Therefore, all the hypotheses under study are accepted.