From patronage to crisis: Welfare politics and the breakdown of rule of law in Bangladesh’s political transformation

Abstract

This article theorizes and traces a mechanism in which welfare provision, once routed through partisan brokers, morphs into patronage that corrodes the rule of law, culminating in crisis and an interim political settlement. Using a qualitative, theory-guided case of Bangladesh (2024–2025), we combine process tracing with critical discourse analysis of domestic and international media, elite speeches, and rights reports, and we benchmark trajectories with V-Dem and International IDEA indicators. This study shows that campus welfare arenas (residential hall seats, stipends, and student-union access) plausibly operated as transmission belts linking micro-level brokerage to macro-level selective legality. As a youth-led movement, it reframed distributive grievances as justice claims, triggering preference cascades and elite defections that led to leadership exit, parliamentary dissolution, and the establishment a civilian interim government. The interim has exposed institutional fragility (constitutional ambiguity; sticky patronage networks) yet also opened reform avenues—most notably investigations into disappearances and attempts to depoliticize student welfare. Theoretically, we propose a framework—brokered welfare → selective legality → crisis → liminal interim → legal re-embedding or patronage recovery—with a preliminary shadow comparison to Sri Lanka and Nepal.