State the major trends regarding voting pattern in India
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Explanation:
Hundreds of millions of Indians will take part in the largest organized democratic exercise ever recorded in the spring of 2014, barring the collapse of the ruling United Progressive Alliance government led by the Indian National Congress or a move by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to call an early general election. If all goes according to plan, by June India will have selected 543 members of the sixteenth Lok Sabha, the popularly elected lower house of parliament or the House of the People. The makeup of the house will determine who emerges as the country’s next prime minister.
Answer:
Hundreds of millions of Indians will take part in the largest organized democratic exercise ever recorded in the spring of 2014, barring the collapse of the ruling United Progressive Alliance government led by the Indian National Congress or a move by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to call an early general election. If all goes according to plan, by June India will have selected 543 members of the sixteenth Lok Sabha, the popularly elected lower house of parliament or the House of the People. The makeup of the house will determine who emerges as the country’s next prime minister.
India, like the United States, is divided up into parliamentary constituencies (similar to congressional districts), and the person who wins the most votes in each constituency is elected. In this winner-take-all system (referred to as “first past the post”), the “election” is actually a series of 543 discrete constituency elections. The party, or coalition of parties, that manages to cobble together a majority of parliamentary seats forms the government.
Five striking structural trends that have emerged in India’s fifteen postindependence elections set the stage for 2014’s political contest. For starters, political competition in India has grown rapidly, particularly in the last two decades, ushering in a complex, fragmented party system. As elections have become more competitive, the average margin of victory in a typical parliamentary constituency has plummeted, reaching a record low in 2009.
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