COMMENTARY

Minoritarian Rule
How Indias Electoral System Created
the Illusion of a BJP Landslide
Geoffrey Macdonald, Babak Moussavi

Indias 2014 election results

showed a high degree of
disproportionality in the
conversion of votes to seats. The
Bharatiya Janata Party won only
31% of the vote and its vote was
highly geographically
concentrated. The BJPs
landslide victory was in fact due
to the idiosyncrasies of Indias
first-past-the-post electoral
system. While not unique in the
countrys history, the scale of the
BJPs seat bonus in 2014 returns
India to minoritarian as
opposed to majoritarian
democracy, in which democratic
outcomes are perverted by
disproportionately empowering
the ruling party.

Geoffrey Macdonald (macdonald@grinnell.

edu) teaches Political Science at Grinnell
College (US). Babak Moussavi
(babakmoussavi@gmail.com) is a research
assistant at a consulting firm in London (UK).

18

he scale of the Bharatiya Janata

Partys (BJP) electoral victory shattered the conventional understanding that India was in a long period of
perpetual coalition government. Many
analysts claimed Narendra Modis popularity, coupled with United Progressive
Alliance/Congress corruption, moved a
majority of voters to the BJP. However,
the partys win was in actuality neither
overwhelming nor unique. The BJP won
a parliamentary majority with just 31%
of the vote due to a common structural
anomaly of first-past-the-post (FPTP)
electoral systems that allows a party to
win more seats than a partys vote total
should allow. This phenomenon of severely disproportional seat bonuses is not
new in India. The Congress Party, during
and after Jawaharlal Nehrus reign,
secured a majority in Parliament without
a majority of the votes. The size of seat
bonuses in India declined after 1989,
when the coalition era of Indian politics
began. However, the extreme disproportionality of the BJPs victory has returned
India to the pre-1989 period of minoritarian democratic mandates, where the
ruling party secures power with a small
plurality of the vote.
Indias seat bonuses among the largest
in the world skew election results away
from the will of the majority. Though the
BJPs win in 2014 is certainly legitimate,
its democratic support is weaker than
conventional wisdom suggests. With 31%
of the vote and 20% of the electorate
(when turnout is factored in), the BJP can
only claim support from a small percentage of Indians. Indeed, almost 70% of
Indian voters selected a different party.
FPTP Incentives
Indias parliamentary democracy uses FPTP
elections and single-member districts, in
which the winning candidate needs only

a plurality of the vote. Political competition under FPTP is traditionally associated with a set of defining characteristics that are created by structural incentives embedded in the electoral system.
Among them is the importance of district
boundaries and population concentrations. If a party has high levels of support
in a particular area of the country, it can
win all the legislative seats for that area.
If this region is highly populated, it can
create large disparities in regional representation, potentially allowing a party
to control the central government with
most of its votes from only one or a few
areas. District boundaries are therefore
fundamentally important. Their shape
determines the population size and
ideological composition of the electorate
facing each party.
FPTP systems are also susceptible to
the problem of wasted votes and vote
splitting. In majoritarian elections, those
who voted for the party that received
49% of the vote are entirely excluded
from explicit representation. The problem
is greater under FPTP systems with
plurality rules, which allow a party to
win a seat with merely the most votes
rather than a majority. If more than two
parties compete in a district, the winning
party could receive substantially less
than 51%, which increases the number
of wasted votes. A similar problem is created by multiple parties competing with
similar platforms or multiple candidates
from the same party running, which is
allowed under some election rules. Using
a plurality mandate, this situation could
result in a minority party winning the
district because, for example, the liberal
or conservative vote was split between
multiple parties or bet ween candidates
who share the same ideology.
Indias 2014 elections showcased these
structural anomalies associated with
FPTP systems. Narendra Modi ran an
extremely effective campaign in the
north and west of India. Sircar (2014)
has shown that in Bihar, Gujarat, Madhya
Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and
Uttar Pradesh, which account for 194
(69%) of BJP seats, the party had a
strike rate meaning victory in constituencies where it fielded a candidate
of 91%. This means that the BJP was

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The geographical distribution of support can hurt or enhance a partys votesto-seats conversion. The BSP and DMK
exemplify the worst possible scenario:
their millions of votes did not win a single
seat. The BJP, however, was the seventh
most efficient converter of votes during
these elections, requiring 6,09,000 votes
per seat. By contrast, the Congress Party
needed 2.4 million votes per seat. The
conversions for the 10 most efficient
parties can be seen in Table 1, as well as
some notable poor performers.

highly efficient at turning votes into seats

in these areas. Yet this also means that
the BJP made virtually no inroads into
large parts of India, confining its presence
to a greater Hindi heartland. Efficiency
considerations were evidently at the
heart of the BJPs electoral strategy.
Concentrating resources and votewinning efforts into areas in which a
party is strong or already has some grassroots support is an effective strategy to
combat wasted votes. Understanding the
specific aspects of a given constituency,
in terms of demographics or levels of
development, informs a party about
whether it is strategic to field a candidate there, i e, whether it has a chance of
winning. By focusing on those constituencies in which a partys message resonates, resources can be deployed most
efficiently. The BJP did this well, focusing resources on the northern and western states, in which its Hindu nationalist
message has traditionally been more
effective. While the Modi campaign
moderated its rhetoric in these elections,
the BJP has an established presence
in this region because its traditional
Hindutva message tends to resonate more
powerfully with these local sub-cultures
than elsewhere.
The distribution of Indias population
benefited the BJP as well. When a partys
supporters are well distributed (i e,
they constitute pluralities in multiple
constituencies), it can sweep a state. In
contrast, if supporters are concentrated
in one constituency, this leads to an inefficient vote/seat ratio and impedes a
partys chances of countrywide success.
Asaduddin Owaisis All India Majlis-eIttehad-ul Muslimeen party fit this profile in Hyderabad, where it contested
and won just one seat in 2009 (Election
Commission 2009). A more severe distribution problem occurs if a party has a
large swathe of supporters who are
distributed over a wide geographical
area in such a way that they constitute a
plurality in zero constituencies, despite
their sizeable overall numbers. This was
the problem that afflicted parties such
as the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and
the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK),
which won 23 million votes and 10 million
votes, respectively, but attained zero seats.

The most efficient parties were relatively small single-state parties, such as
the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP), the Apna
Dal (AD), and the ruling party in Odisha,
the Biju Janata Dal (BJD). Each gained a
seat for less than 5,00,000 votes. Some
of the more established regional and
third-front parties, including the Communist Party of India (CPI), Samajwadi
Party (SP), and Janata Dal (United)
JD(U) meanwhile, were very inefficient at converting votes into seats.
Geography is therefore a key determinant of electoral success under FPTP,
and understanding its impact can lead
to huge rewards. There are myriad
examples of equivalent vote shares for
parties but enormous differences in outcome. In Jammu and Kashmir, Congress
acquired 22.9% of the vote share,
against 32.4% of the BJP, and 20.5% for
the Jammu and Kashmir Peoples Democratic Party (JKPDP). But despite beating
the JKPDP into third place, Congress

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won no seats, while the other two

acquired three each.
Maharashtras political divisions produced a similarly odd verdict in 2014.
The contest for the state was a fourway battle, with a total range of 10%
between the winning party and the
fourth-placed party. The top four parties collectively account for roughly
80% of the vote share. The outcomes
though were far from proportional: in
the October 2014 assembly election,
the BJP collected roughly three times

Table 1: 2014 Election Results Ranked by Vote Seat Conversion*

Efficiency Acronym
Rank

Party Name

VotesSeats
Conversion

Total Votes

Vote Share Seats

(%)

LJP

Lok Janshakti Party

3,82,822

22,96,929

0.40

AD

Apna Dal

4,10,910

8,21,820

0.10

BJD

Biju Janata Dal

4,74,575

94,91,497

1.70

20

AIADMK

All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam

4,89,617

1,81,15,825

3.30

37

IUML

Indian Union Muslim League

5,50,048

11,00,096

0.20

SHS

Shiv Sena

5,70,166

1,02,62,982

1.90

18

BJP

Bharatiya Janata Party

6,08,715 17,16,57,549

TRS

Telangana Rashtra Samithi

6,12,408

67,36,490

31.00 282
1.20

11

AITC

All India Trinamool Congress

6,25,285

2,12,59,681

3.80

34

7,77,680

23,33,040

0.40

24,30,415 10,69,38,242

19.30

44
4

10

AIUDF

All India United Democratic Front

24

INC

Indian National Congress

25

AAP

Aam Aadmi Party

28,31,409

1,13,25,635

2.00

26

JD(U)

Janata Dal (United)

29,96,098

59,92,196

1.10

27

SP

Samajwadi Party

37,34,583

1,86,72,916

3.40

28

CPI

Communist Party of India

43,27,298

43,27,298

0.80

* Seat-winning parties that were aggregated into the Others category by the Election Commission have not been
included in this table.
Source: Election Commission of India.

more seats than either the Congress (in

third place) or Nationalist Congress Party
(NCP) (fourth), despite the 10% higher
vote share.
Yet the impact of voters geographical
distribution appears to have been overlooked by many observers. An Economic
& Political Weekly editorial claimed in
the aftermath of the elections:
If some parties have been rendered weak in
these elections, this has more to do with their
politics, government record and inability to
stop a fall in vote share, and less to do with
the vagaries of the FPTP system (2014: 9).

However, the data does not support this

position. For example, the SPs vote share
stayed roughly constant between 2009
and 2014, at around 3.4%. But in 2009 it
received over four times as many seats
(23). Nitish Kumars JD(U) shows a similar
pattern, with a slightly lower vote share
(1.5% in 2009, against 1.1% in 2014), but
a 90% drop in representatives. Had
these parties voters been distributed in a
19

COMMENTARY

more geographically concentrated way,

allowing for a greater number of pluralities to be formed, they would have a
higher share of representation in the
Lok Sabha.
Similarly, Chhibber and Verma claim
that FPTP was not responsible for the
size of the electoral victory because a
deeper look at the aggregate election
returns shows that the BJPs victory
was, in fact, comprehensive (2014: 54).
Their dichotomy is a false one, however.
As shown above, the Modi wave was not
universal or uniform, but this does not
deny a comprehensive increase in the
BJPs vote share. The data confirms this:
at 31%, the partys national vote share
had risen greatly from the 19% it received in 2009. However, it is the mechanics of FPTP that converted this rise into a
massive electoral victory.
Indian Minoritarianism
The benefits of FPTP systems for democracy are largely absent in India. FPTP
elections are generally lauded for producing two-party electoral competition
that presents a clear choice to the voters,
efficient single-party governments, and
a coherent, unified opposition that excludes extremist parties. However, prior
to the BJPs landslide victory, no party
had formed a non-coalition government
in over two decades. The parliamentary
opposition has always been and remains
fractious. And parliamentary elections
feature a high degree of political fragmentation, with dozens of parties competing across the country for seats.
These features generate myriad negative
effects in a FPTP system.
An important consequence of party
fragmentation in Indias majoritarian
system is de facto minority rule through
enormous seat bonus anomalies. No
individual party has ever received a majority vote share in India. The Janata coalition in 1977 did achieve over 50% of
the vote, but this was an unwieldy and
ultimately unsustainable amalgamation
of different political groups. In 1984,
Rajiv Gandhi led the Congress to just
short of 50% in an emotionally charged
election after the assassination of his
mother, Indira Gandhi. But even during
the early years after independence,
20

Figure 1: Winning Shares (Seats/Votes) for Lok Sabha Elections

30

(in %)

Seat bonus

29.45

28.57

27.32 28.36

25

24.17

23.88

20.41
20

15

13.64
11.76

10

9.25

9.64

8.51

7.80

6.61
5
0.36

0.08

1951 1957 1962 1967 1971 1977 1980 1984 1989 1991 1996 1998 1999 2004 2009 2014
The 19892009 period of lower seat bonuses is shown in light shade, while the era of hyper-seat bonuses, including the
2014 elections, are depicted in dark shade.
Source: Election Commission of India.

when the Congress Party dominated the

political scene, Jawaharlal Nehru, the
tall man of Indian politics, never
achieved a majority of the vote. While
Nehru consistently received a vote share
of around 45%, the electoral system ensured his majorities were enormous:
around 75% of the Lok Sabha would belong to Congress. Similarly, the BJP won
its narrow parliamentary majority in
2014 with just 31% of the vote.
Focusing on the winning partys seat
bonus presents a novel periodisation of
Indian politics. Between 1951 and 1984,
Indias winning party usually Congress during this period had an average seat bonus of 23.39%. Six of the eight
elections during the period saw seat bonuses higher than this average. The
1989 election marked a distinct shift.1
The average seat bonus for the winning
party was just 6.04% after this (excluding the 2014 elections). This fluctuated
between 0.08% and 9.64% during this
period, which is roughly similar to other
established Westminster democracies.
The last BJP victory, in 1999, yielded a
seat bonus of 9.64%, which is high for
the period, but far below the average of
the pre-1989 period (Figure 1).
However, the BJPs 2014 elections
appears to return Indian politics to the hyper
seat bonuses of the 195184 period. This
disproportional outcome creates extreme
minoritarianism, in which a plurality
of voters selects the majority of representatives in Parliament. While this phenomenon is not unusual in FPTP systems,
the severity of Indias disproportionality

undermines the democratic legitimacy

of the winning party, whose power is
unequal to its support. This is as true for
Nehrus 1951 victory as it is for Modis
win in 2014. Both of these victories
along with the others during the minoritarian period of 195184 were not
popular landslides but rather electoral
landslides. The Congress and BJP were
able to exploit a weak and fractured
opposition to gain parliamentary majorities with nowhere near a majority of
the vote.2 Indian minoritarianism is even
more severe when we take into account
the proportion of the overall electorate
that has supported the majority-winning
party. The turnout data in 2014 shows
that only just over 20% of the electorate
supported the BJP.3
Conclusions
The scale of the BJPs victory shocked
many observers and led some to conclude a new period of Indian politics had
begun. However, a closer look at the
geographic distribution of the BJPs voters
suggests its support was hardly widespread. The partys constituencies were
strategically concentrated across key
areas, which allowed the BJP to maximise its seat share and minimise wasted
votes. In a FPTP system, this creates extreme seat bonuses from which the winning party can benefit.
Large seat bonuses are not new in
Indian politics. The Nehru/Congress
victories before 1989 saw a high degree
of disproportionality in the conversion
of votes to seats. The BJPs win returns

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India to a phase of extreme minority rule,

in which the electoral system grants
enormous power to the democratic
ruler. But minoritarianism can have
negative consequences for democracy. A
winning party can pursue policies that
benefit the small constituency that got it
elected even while claiming to have much
broader backing. This seat bonus anomaly can thus create a veneer of majority
support that does not exist in reality.
Narendra Modi called his partys
historic win a victory for India. Time
will tell whether the BJPs policies will
help the country, but the partys win was
not a victory for the will of the majority
of Indians. The BJPs parliamentary control was won with a plurality of Indian
voters and an even smaller plurality of
the Indian electorate. Most Indians voted
for a different party or not at all. Though
the BJPs win was undeniably legitimate,

its electoral backing is actually quite

narrow. This paradoxical outcome was
the result of institutional rules that
pervert the democratic process and
empower the ruling party well beyond
its actual support thus creating the
illusion of a landslide.

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Notes
1

It should be noted that this election also marked

the onset of Yadavs third electoral system
(1999).
One difference that should be noted, and further
explored, is that the second-placed party in
2014 (Congress) was a much more substantial
force than any rival to Nehru, who presided
over an array of virtually insignificant challengers. This suggests that a period of BJP
dominance may not be about to commence,
akin to the earlier era of Congress dominance.
But the minoritarian nature of the victories remains similar, as does the fact that both Modi
and Nehru benefited from hyper seat bonuses.
This figure was calculated by multiplying the
winning vote share by the turnout. As the BJP
acquired roughly 31.34% of the vote share, the
proportion of the electorate that supported it
was 20.8%, calculated on the basis of a reported

national turnout of 66.38%. Before concluding

that this figure is especially low, it is worth noting
that Jawaharlal Nehru commanded the explicit
support of an even smaller proportion (20.19%)
of the electorate in his landslide Congress victory
of 1951 (based on a vote share of 44.99% and
turnout of 44.87%) (Election Commission 1951).

References
Chhibber, P and R Verma (2014): The BJPs 2014
Modi Wave, Economic & Political Weekly, 49
(39): 5056.
Economic & Political Weekly (2014): Debating Electoral Systems, 7 June, XLIX (23): 89.
Election Commission (1951): Statistical Report on
General Elections, 1951: to the First Lok Sabha, viewed on 4 November 2014, http://eci.
nic.in/eci_main/StatisticalReports/LS_1951/
VOL_ 1_ 51_LS.PDF).
(2009): Full Statistical Reports, viewed on
26 October 2014, http://eci.nic.in/eci_main1/
ElectionStatistics.aspx).
Sircar, N (2014): The Numbers Game: An Analysis
of the 2014 General Election, India Transition,
23 June, viewed on 5 August 2014, http://indiaintransition.com/2014/06/23/the-numbersgame-an-analysis-of-the-2014-general-election/
Yadav, Y (1999): Electoral Politics in the Time
of Change: Indias Third Electoral System,
1989-99, Economic & Political Weekly, 34 (34/35):
239399.

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