The BJP And INC Electoral Elections

The BJP did not have this problem: as Table 6.3 shows, in each of the eight elections the value of its amplification coefficient was less than one meaning that is was able to neutralise some of its vote disadvantage, relative to the non-BJP parties, in terms of its seat disadvantage. For example, in 2009, with α = 0.89, for every vote won by the BJP, the non-BJP parties won 4.3 votes but, for every seat won by the BJP, the non-BJP parties won 3.7 seats. Thus the essential difference between the BJP and the INC was that, compared to the INC, the BJP was more efficient in translating votes into seats.
In order to understand this measure of this inefficiency consider a party which targets, say, 200 (out of a total of 543) seats in the Lok Sabha. Then, from equation (6.2), the vote ratio which will deliver this is: …show more content…
MacMahon— – in evidence before the Royal Commission on Systems of Elections (2010). Bear in mind that ‘observations’ were distinguished by constituency name and by election year: so, for example, Adilabad in the 1989 Lok Sabha election represented a separate observation from Adilabad in the 1991 Lok Sabha election.

Party A: (1/4.4) × 100 = 22.7 and party B: (3.4/4.4) × 100 = 77.3. Another perverse outcome would be when party A obtains more votes than party B but wins fewer seats: . In this situation the numerator in equation (2) is negative, with the denominator positive, so that α < 0. This is a situation in which where the party A’s majority in votes fails to translate into a parliamentary majority. This implies that in 2014, the INC received 19.3 % of total votes while winning only 8 % of seats while the BJP, with 31 % of total vote, won 52 % of the seats. For the INC, and; for the BJP,