Votes, Parties, and Seats: A Quantitative Analysis of Indian Parliamentary Elections, 1962–2014

173 Pages·2016·2.75 MB·English

by  Vani Kant Borooah (auth.)

VOTES, PARTIES,
AND SEATS
A Quantitative Analysis
of Indian Parliamentary
Elections, 1962–2014
Vani Kant Borooah
Votes, Parties, and Seats

Vani   Kant   Borooah
Votes, Parties, and
Seats
A Quantitative Analysis of Indian Parliamentary
Elections, 1962–2014
Vani   Kant   Borooah
School of Economics
Ulster University
Newtownabbey, County Antrim, United Kingdom
ISBN 978-3-319-30486-1 ISBN 978-3-319-30487-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-30487-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016943277
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In memory of my father, Dev Kant Borooah (1914–1996): scholar, poet,
politician.

P
REFACE
My life changed irrevocably at the age of two when my father was elected
as the Member for Nowgong to India’s Lower House of Parliament (the
Lok Sabha ) in the Indian General Election of 1951, and we moved from,
what was then, the sleepy backwater of the state of Assam to the hurly-
burly of metropolitan life in India’s capital, New Delhi. In those years
of living in New Delhi, discussion of electoral politics and parliamentary
affairs was very much the staple of conversation within the home, and I
grew up with an easy familiarity with terms like ‘whipping members into
lobbies’, ‘lame-duck sessions’, ‘waving order papers’, and—indignity of
indignities—‘naming by the Speaker’. Parliament and elections were, so
to speak, ‘in my blood’. Years later, after I moved to England and became
an academic economist, when politics ceased to be part of life’s quotidian
rhythm, my interest in parliamentary elections did not wane. This book is
the product of that undimmed interest.
The foundations of this book lie in a set of data which records the
details of the election result for each candidate, for all the constituencies,
in every L ok Sabha General Election from 1962 to 2014. The edifi ce built
upon this foundation, and discussed in this book, is the result of inter-
rogating these data. The central purpose of this interrogation was to give
shape to the notion of ‘electoral effi ciency’ by which is meant the capacity
of a party to convert votes into parliamentary seats. Parliamentary elec-
tions in India—and also elections to its state assemblies—are conducted
under the First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) system: a single representative for
each of 543 constituencies is elected—on the basis of obtaining the largest
vii
viii PREFACE
number of votes of all the candidates contesting that constituency—as a
member of the L ok Sabha for that constituency.
The disjoint, under the FPTP electoral system, between the votes
obtained by a party and the seats won by it frequently causes surprise,
sometimes bordering on consternation. Most recently, in the UK General
Election of May 2015, the Scottish National Party won 56 seats in the
House of Commons on the back of just under 1.5 million votes, while in
the same election, the UK Independence Party received nearly 4 million
votes and were rewarded with just one seat. Unlike a proportional elec-
toral system, in which a party’s share of the total vote is a good predictor
of its share of parliamentary seats, the relation between a party’s votes and
its seats in an FPTP system works in mysterious ways. The primary pur-
pose of this book, as captured in its title, is to throw light on this relation-
ship for Indian parliamentary elections.
Given that India’s two main political parties—the Indian National
Congress (INC) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—receive, between
them, over half the national parliamentary vote, the analysis in this book
is restricted to a comparison of the relative electoral effi ciencies of these
two parties. This leads to a further constraint. The BJP made its electoral
debut in the 1984 L ok Sabha elections, winning just two seats, but really
got into its stride in the 1989 L ok Sabha elections when it won 85 seats.
Consequently, a great deal, but not all, of the analysis in this book is a
comparison of the INC and the BJP and, consequently, restricted to the
eight L ok Sabha elections of 1989, 1991, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2004, 2009,
and 2014.
The tenor of this book, consistent with my métier as an academic econ-
omist, is analytical, based upon a rigorous examination of the data. In
the process, I have drawn heavily upon the methodology of economics
and statistics to shed light on electoral outcomes in India. Chapter 3 uses
systems estimation techniques to predict the probabilities of the INC and
BJP winning elections—and Chap. 5 uses systems estimation techniques
to predict the vote shares of the INC and the BJP—in constituencies con-
tested by both parties; Chap. 4 uses Bayesian methods to analyse the issue
of anti-incumbency; Chap. 6 refi nes the concept of the ‘Cubic Law of
Elections’ to develop the concept of the ‘amplifi cation coeffi cient’ which
amplifi es votes into seats; and Chap. 7 measures vote concentration and
vote inequality with particular reference to the decomposition of inequal-
ity and carries out two signifi cant simulations with regard to the inter-
constituency distribution of the INC and BJP vote.
PREFACE ix
In writing this book, my primary debt of gratitude is to Dr. Surjit Bhalla
and to Dr. Kai Gehring for providing me with the data upon which the
analysis in this book is based. Thanks are also due to Ulka Athale-Smit
for research assistance and to Vidya Borooah for commenting on parts
of the manuscript. Needless to say, I am solely responsible for this book’s
shortcomings.
I am grateful to my publisher Rachel Sangster for encouraging me
to write this book, to Gemma Leigh for her editorial work, to Jayashree
Ramamoorthy for overseeing the book’s production and to an anonymous
referee whose comments greatly improved the book’s presentation and
contents.
Vani   K.   Borooah
Belfast
January 2016