IF General Kayani keeps his promise to not upend the democratic process in the next 24 months, Pakistani political parties will be in uncharted territory.

It will be the first time in our country’s history that the national and provincial assemblies will have completed their terms; the first time that our political parties will have participated in two consecutive (relatively) free and fair elections. To say this would be an important milestone is an understatement.

Of course such a development would bring its own set of challenges for these parties. Mainly, it would ensure that voters have parties’ recent records in mind, with nowhere to hide. Historically, this has not been the case. Our parties have generally mobilised vote banks either on the basis of patronage, or a sense of victimisation by highlighting real and perceived crimes against them.

Politicking as collective martyrs will still be a popular tactic in the 2013 elections, but it may not work as well as it did in years past. Unaligned voters will have more prosaic concerns: what have you actually done in the last five years? Pakistanis’ collective memories may be short, but not that short. To address these challenges our parties have to make actual policymaking and governance more salient in their campaigning. They must talk about actual on-the-ground solutions to on-the-ground problems.

Talking about policy is not just good for parties’ bottom lines; it benefits the body politic as a whole. Parties’ platforms have significant implications for the strength of a democratic system. Theoretically speaking, democracy is preferable to dictatorship not because the former guarantees a ‘better life’ per se — it does not — but because it guarantees self-correction. If you are stuck with a bad dictator, you can be stuck for a long, long time. Just ask North Koreans or Zimbabweans or Ugandans. Conversely, a bad government in a democracy can be replaced peacefully, efficiently and predictably. That is the essential value of elections.

Inherent to this model, however, is the notion that political parties voice clear and identifiable alternative policy positions, so that voters can make informed decisions at the ballot box. Are you for low taxes on business and high taxes on agriculture, or the other way around? What are your plans for the 40 million children of school-going age who are not in school? How do you propose solving Pakistan’s energy crisis? What is your view on the place of Islam in our society and politics? How should the Balochistan insurgency be addressed? And so on.

The trouble is that we know next to nothing about how our parties think about these issues. Aside from vague manifestos, our parties fail at articulating a coherent set of policies. They are good with congealed narratives of ethnic or nationalistic solidarity (the ANP, the MQM), or a sense of victimisation (the PPP, the MQM), or unspecific policies to care for the ‘common man’ (every party in Pakistan), but not so good at telling us what they actually stand for. This is a problem.

The main reason why this is a problem is that issues such as energy, education, water and taxes are truly massive in scale and need to be tackled by society at large. Political parties all over the world are meant to aggregate the preferences of the public so that they can be discussed, amended, processed and turned into action.

But our parties are not proactive on policy and in doing so leave space for one or two actors to take hegemonic control of events. Don’t want to talk about Balochistan? Okay, then you consign it to the hands of the military (not exactly known for its strategic prescience) and Baloch nationalists. Don’t have the guts to make explicit your views on the blasphemy laws? Okay, then you allow religious hardliners to take exclusive hold of the debate. Such abdication has palpable effects on people’s lives.

Unfortunately, the only time our parties seem to concern themselves with policy is when it is least useful: either as tools of symbolism, such as the PML-N’s 10-point reform agenda, or as instruments of political opportunism, such as the opposition’s stance on the Reformed General Sales Tax.

This must change. For the health of the democratic system — not to mention the country as a whole — parties must be reservoirs of ideas on governance. Even from an individual party’s perspective, an occupation with policy specifics would be a net plus, electorally speaking. In a world where no one is concerned with policy, the first party to be really concerned with policy will stand out, and thus be more likable to voters. At present, however, our parties seem oblivious to the gains in talking about things that really matter.

No one expects parties to abandon good old-fashioned, hard-nosed politicking of the type seen since the JUI-F left the government last month. That would be naïve. But it is not too much to expect parties to devote some focus to their practical visions of the future. Greater attention to governance could prove hugely consequential for citizens’ confidence in democracy, which in Pakistan’s case can waver easily, especially in the urban middle classes. In order to ensure political parties have a viable future, they must work to ensure the rest of Pakistan does.

The writer is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Chicago and blogs at Five Rupees.