Chapter 3: Franchise and Representation
In the winter of 1949, clerks across India were copying out the longest list ever attempted anywhere in the world. India was about to hold its first general election, and every adult citizen was to be on the roll — landless labourers, factory workers, housewives, princes, all of them equal on paper. No country had ever begun democratic life by enfranchising so many people who could not read the ballot they would be handed.
Then the officials preparing the rolls in several provinces noticed a problem. Large numbers of women had been entered not by their own names, but as ‘wife of’ or ‘mother of’ a man. Nobody had asked them what they were called. About 2.8 million such entries stood on the draft rolls.
The Election Commission, under the first Chief Election Commissioner, Sukumar Sen, had a decision to make. It could let the entries stand, and count the women in. Or it could insist that a voter must be listed under her own name, delete the entries, and re-enrol the women properly.
It chose the second. The entries were struck off, publicly criticised, and the point was made: the vote belonged to a person, not to a household. The election went ahead in 1951–52, with more than 170 million people on the roll.
Deciding who votes is never a clerical matter. It is a political argument about who counts.
Diagram
Fig. 3.0-1 Caption: Voters queuing at a polling station during India’s first general election of 1951–52. Brief: A documentary-style illustration or archival photograph of a rural polling station of the early 1950s — a line of men and women waiting outside a small building, a ballot box marked with a party symbol, a polling official at a table with a printed roll. Label the ballot box and the electoral roll. Emphasise the ordinariness of the voters and the length of the queue.
3.1 Universal Adult Franchise
Every democracy has to answer one question before it can answer any other. Who is allowed to vote?
The answer looks obvious to us now. It was not obvious for most of the history of representative government. For nearly two centuries, states that called themselves free restricted the vote to men, to property owners, to taxpayers, to the literate, or to particular races. The struggle to widen that circle is one of the central political stories of the modern world.
3.1.1 The Meaning of Franchise and Universal Adult Franchise
The word franchise means the right to vote in the election of public representatives. It comes from the old French franc, meaning free, because in medieval Europe the right belonged only to free men of standing. The same right is also called suffrage, and the two words are used interchangeably in political science.
Adult franchise means that the right to vote is given to adults as adults, and not as the holders of property, degrees or titles. Universal adult franchise is the principle that every adult citizen of a state has the right to vote, without discrimination on grounds of caste, class, religion, gender, race, language, education or wealth.
The word ‘universal’ does not mean unlimited. Every system sets an age below which a person cannot vote, and every system disqualifies some categories of people. What ‘universal’ rules out is a qualification that divides adult citizens into higher and lower classes of political worth.
What The Constitution Provides
In India the principle is written into the Constitution itself, which is why it cannot be narrowed by an ordinary law passed by Parliament.
The voting age was originally 21. The Sixty-first Constitutional Amendment Act, 1988 lowered it to 18, bringing several crore younger citizens onto the electoral roll — the official list of voters prepared for each constituency.
Registration matters as much as the right itself. A citizen who is entitled to vote but whose name is missing from the roll cannot vote at all. In India the roll is prepared and revised by the Election Commission, an independent constitutional body that conducts elections to Parliament, the State legislatures and the offices of President and Vice-President.
How Narrow The Franchise Once Was
Before 1947, voting in British India was a privilege attached to property and payment. The Government of India Act, 1935 widened the electorate considerably, yet it still left the great majority of adults with no vote at all. Rich men chose the representatives of poor men.
Independent India broke with this at a single stroke. The Constituent Assembly, the elected body that framed the Constitution between 1946 and 1949, decided early that the new republic would begin with full adult franchise rather than extend it in stages. B. R. Ambedkar, who chaired the Drafting Committee, explained why the principle mattered so much in a society as unequal as India’s.
Ambedkar is making two claims at once. The first is that political equality had been achieved: at the ballot box the landlord and the landless labourer would count the same. The second is a warning — that this equality stops at the polling booth, because social and economic life remained deeply unequal.
Notice what the extract cannot settle. It records what one member argued on one day, in a speech meant to persuade an assembly. It does not tell us whether other members agreed, whether the prediction came true, or how ordinary voters outside the Assembly understood the vote they were about to receive. For that we would need evidence of a different kind.
Political equality — the principle that each citizen’s political voice counts equally, whatever their wealth or status — is the idea universal adult franchise puts into practice. It is expressed in the rule of one person, one vote, and in the secret ballot, which allows a voter to record a choice that no employer, landlord or family member can inspect.
India was not alone in arriving late, and other democracies arrived slowly. Table 3.1 gives the year in which women in five countries obtained the vote in national elections on the same terms as men.
Read the table from the top. New Zealand acted more than half a century before Switzerland, a country with a long republican tradition. India, a much poorer and newly independent state, reached the same point twenty-one years before Switzerland did. Wealth and age of a democracy plainly do not predict when the franchise was widened.
The table also has sharp limits. It records the year a legal right was granted, not the year it became usable. In the United States, Black citizens in several southern states were kept from voting by literacy tests and intimidation for four decades after 1920, until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. A single date in a column cannot show any of that.
3.1.2 Reasons for the Widespread Acceptance of Universal Adult Franchise
Universal adult franchise is now the normal standard for a democratic state. Almost every country that claims to be democratic claims also to elect its rulers on this basis. Why did an idea once thought dangerous become the ordinary expectation?
It follows from the idea of political equality. If all citizens are equal before the law, it is difficult to argue that some of them should have a smaller share in choosing lawmakers. Once equality is accepted as a principle, restricting the vote demands a justification that is hard to supply.
It makes government legitimate. Legitimacy is the general acceptance that a government has the right to rule. A government elected by the whole adult population can claim to speak for the whole population; one elected by a tenth of it cannot.
It allows governments to be changed without violence. Where the excluded have no lawful way of removing a ruler, the only route left is force. Where every adult holds a vote, an unpopular government can be dismissed at the next election. This is the strongest practical argument in favour of the principle.
It draws in groups that were historically shut out. Women, the poor, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes were excluded for centuries by qualifications that seemed neutral but were not. A property qualification excludes the poor without ever naming them.
It compels parties to speak to everybody. Candidates go where the votes are. When the votes are spread across the whole adult population, parties must address the concerns of ordinary people rather than of a small propertied class.
It educates citizens politically. Elections force parties to explain, and voters to weigh, competing claims about taxation, employment and welfare. Over repeated elections, the electorate learns to judge performance.
It is now recognised as a human right. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, states that the will of the people is the basis of governmental authority, expressed through periodic and genuine elections by universal and equal suffrage.
In former colonies it marked a break with colonial rule. Colonial governments had restricted the franchise deliberately. Adopting universal adult franchise at independence was a public statement that the excluded were now citizens rather than subjects.
These arguments are strong, but they were resisted for a long time, and the objection deserves to be heard rather than dismissed.
The franchise settles who may vote. It does not settle whether they must. India, the United Kingdom and the United States treat voting as a right the citizen may decline to use. Some states, including Belgium and Australia, make voting compulsory and penalise those who fail to appear.
3.2 Representation and Its Methods
A right to vote is of little use unless the votes are turned into something — a legislature, a government, a set of decisions. The rules that perform this conversion are the electoral system, and they matter enormously. The same votes, counted under different rules, can produce very different parliaments.
3.2.1 The Meaning of Representation
Representation is the arrangement by which citizens choose a small number of persons to act and speak for them in the making of law and policy. The chosen person is a representative; the body they sit in is a representative assembly.
The reason for the arrangement is practical. In a city-state of a few thousand adults, citizens could gather in one place and decide matters directly. In a country of more than a hundred crore people, no assembly of the whole can meet, debate or decide. Representation is how the consent of a large population is organised.
It is more than a convenience, though. A representative is expected to carry the views, needs and grievances of the people of an area into the legislature, and to answer to them at the next election. This is what distinguishes an elected representative from an appointed official: the official is accountable upwards, the representative is accountable downwards.
Representatives are also expected to deliberate, not merely to transmit. A legislator who received binding instructions on every question would be a messenger rather than a member. How far a representative should follow the immediate wishes of the voters, and how far their own judgement, is one of the oldest arguments in political theory.
The Constituency As The Unit
Almost every modern system organises representation territorially. The country is divided into geographical units called constituencies, and each constituency elects its own representative or representatives.
A constituency is the basic electoral unit — a defined area whose registered voters together elect a representative to a legislature. In India, the country is divided into 543 parliamentary constituencies for elections to the Lok Sabha, and each State is further divided into assembly constituencies.
Constituencies should be roughly equal in population, so that one member does not represent five times as many people as another. Because populations shift, the boundaries have to be redrawn periodically. In India this is done by a Delimitation Commission, a body set up by law to revise constituency boundaries and the number of seats allotted to each State.
Constituencies are of two kinds. A single-member constituency returns one representative; a multi-member constituency returns two or more from the same area. The choice between them is not a technical detail — it decides which electoral systems are even possible, as the next two subsections show.
India also reserves some constituencies. Under Articles 330 and 332 of the Constitution, a number of seats in the Lok Sabha and in the State Legislative Assemblies are reserved for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes. In a reserved constituency all voters vote, but only candidates from the specified community may contest.
3.2.2 The First-Past-the-Post System
The first-past-the-post system, usually shortened to FPTP, is an electoral system in which each voter casts one vote for one candidate in a single-member constituency, and the candidate with the largest number of votes is declared elected.
The crucial word is ‘largest’, not ‘majority’. The winner needs a plurality — more votes than any other single candidate — and not more than half the votes cast. This is why the system is also called the simple majority or plurality system. It is used in India, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada.
Consider a constituency where 50,000 valid votes are polled among four candidates:
- Candidate P: 18,000 votes
- Candidate Q: 14,000 votes
- Candidate R: 11,000 votes
- Candidate S: 7,000 votes
Candidate P is elected, with 18,000 votes out of 50,000. Work out the share: \(\frac{18{,}000}{50{,}000} \times 100 = 36\) per cent. Thirty-six per cent of the voters chose P; sixty-four per cent chose somebody else. Their votes elect nobody and are said to be wasted.
The image behind the name is a race. Whoever crosses the finishing line first wins, and it makes no difference whether the runner-up was a step behind or a mile behind.
3.2.3 Proportional Representation
Proportional representation, usually shortened to PR, is an electoral system in which the seats a party wins in the legislature are allotted in approximate proportion to the votes it receives. If a party polls one-third of the votes, it should hold about one-third of the seats.
The system rests on a different idea of what an election is for. FPTP asks who should represent this area. PR asks how the whole assembly should mirror the divisions of opinion in the whole electorate. Because a single seat cannot be divided proportionally, PR requires multi-member constituencies.
The Two Principal Methods
Proportional representation is not one procedure but a family of them. Two are standard.
In the list system, each party puts up a ranked list of candidates and the voter votes for a party rather than for an individual. Seats are then distributed among the parties in proportion to the votes each has polled, and are filled from the top of each party’s list downwards. Germany, Israel and several European states use forms of the list system.
In the single transferable vote system, the voter ranks individual candidates in order of preference — 1, 2, 3 and so on. A candidate is elected on reaching a fixed quota of votes. Surplus votes above the quota, and the votes of eliminated candidates, are transferred to the next preference marked on each ballot, so that as few votes as possible are wasted.
India uses the single transferable vote for indirect elections rather than for the Lok Sabha. Members of the Rajya Sabha are elected by the elected members of each State’s Legislative Assembly by this method, and the President is elected by a similar system of preferences.
The two systems have now been explained separately. Table 3.2 sets the contrast out in one place.
Neither column is simply the better one. FPTP is easy to understand, produces a clear local representative for every area, and usually delivers a decisive result on counting day. PR reflects the spread of opinion far more accurately and gives smaller parties a chance of entry, but it makes single-party majorities rare and hands considerable power to parties in deciding lists and forming governments afterwards.
3.3 Political Parties
Elections need candidates, and candidates need organisation. Somebody must select who stands, raise money, print manifestos, argue the case in a thousand villages at once, and tell the voter what a cross against a name will mean for the next five years. That work is done by political parties.
A political party is an organised group of citizens who hold broadly similar political views and who seek to capture and exercise governmental power through constitutional means, chiefly by contesting elections.
Every part of that definition is doing work, and it is worth taking the phrases one at a time.
What Makes A Party A Party
An organised group. A party is not a crowd or a mood. It has members, office-bearers, rules for choosing leaders, units at different levels and a name recognised by the public. Its life is longer than the career of any one leader, which is why parties survive the deaths of their founders.
A shared body of ideas. Members are held together by some common principle, programme, identity or set of demands — an economic doctrine, a regional claim, a linguistic identity, a social reform. This is what allows a voter to predict roughly what a candidate will do without knowing them personally.
The aim of capturing power. A party seeks to form the government and to run it. This distinguishes it from bodies that only wish to influence policy without holding office.
Constitutional means. A party pursues power by contesting elections and persuading voters, not by armed force. An organisation that intends to seize power by violence is not a political party, whatever it calls itself.
A claim to serve the general interest. Parties argue that their programme is good for the country as a whole. Whether the claim is true in any given case is exactly what elections are fought over.
The last two points were captured in a famous definition given more than two centuries ago by the British statesman Edmund Burke.
Burke is defending parties against a common charge of his day — that they were selfish factions dividing the nation. His definition answers the charge by building the national interest into the meaning of the word. Note that this is a claim being made in an argument, not a neutral report. A definition that requires parties to pursue the national interest cannot then be used to test whether real parties actually do so. For that question we need evidence about how particular parties have behaved.
Parties, Pressure Groups And Factions
Two neighbouring things are often confused with parties, and the difference lies in what each wants.
A pressure group is an organised body that seeks to influence government policy in a particular field without seeking to form the government itself. A trade union, a farmers’ association, a chamber of commerce and an environmental campaign are all pressure groups. They lobby, petition, publish and protest; they do not put up candidates in the hope of taking office.
A faction is a group within a party, or within a legislature, that pursues a sectional interest of its own. A faction is defined by whom it is for; a party claims to be for the country. Factions are a normal feature of large parties, and the strain they cause is a recurring theme of Indian politics.
Parties In Government And In Opposition
A party that wins a majority of seats forms the government. Parties that do not still have a definite place in the system, and this is easily overlooked.
The opposition consists of the parties in a legislature that are not in government. Their task is to question ministers, examine and criticise bills, expose failures, and present themselves as an alternative government at the next election. A legislature without an effective opposition cannot hold a government to account, whatever its formal powers.
In India, symbols matter for the ordinary voter as much as manifestos. The Election Commission recognises parties and allots each a symbol, which appears beside the candidate’s name on the ballot unit of the electronic voting machine, so that a voter who cannot read the names can still vote for the party of their choice.
Parties are so familiar that it is easy to assume they must exist. Several early democratic thinkers thought otherwise, and the argument is still worth testing.
3.4 The Party System and Its Kinds
Knowing what a party is does not yet tell us what politics in a country feels like. That depends on how many parties matter, how they compete, and whether power ever changes hands between them.
3.4.1 What a Party System Is
A party system is the pattern of interaction and competition among the political parties of a country — how many of them are significant, how they compete for power, and how governments are formed out of the result.
Party systems are classified by the number of parties that have a real chance of holding power. On this basis three types are distinguished: the single-party system, the bi-party system and the multi-party system.
Two forces shape which type a country ends up with. The first is the electoral system. First-past-the-post penalises parties whose support is spread thinly, so voters learn not to waste votes on small parties, and competition narrows towards two serious contenders in each seat. Proportional representation does the opposite, because a party with a modest national vote can still win seats.
The second force is the shape of society itself. Where a country is divided by region, language, religion or caste, parties tend to form along those divisions, and a system of many parties results even under first-past-the-post. India is the clearest example of this in the world.
3.4.2 The Single-Party System
A single-party system is one in which only one political party is permitted to hold effective power, and no rival party is allowed to compete for it. Elections may be held, but they offer a choice among candidates of the ruling party rather than a choice between parties.
The party in such a system is closely fused with the state. Its ideology becomes official doctrine, its leadership selects those who hold public office, and the administration and the armed forces are aligned with it. China, where the Communist Party of China holds power, and North Korea, governed by the Workers’ Party of Korea, are the standard examples.
Its defenders make the following claims for it.
Stability. With no rival party able to displace it, the government is not brought down between elections, and its tenure is secure.
Speed of decision. Policy does not have to survive prolonged opposition in the legislature, so decisions can be taken and enforced quickly.
Continuity of policy. A long-term programme — industrialisation, infrastructure, population policy — can be pursued across decades without reversal by a successor government.
Low electoral cost. A state that does not hold competitive elections spends far less on conducting them.
Unity of purpose. A single doctrine, applied everywhere, is said to reduce the pull of rival regional and sectional loyalties.
These are the arguments made on its behalf, and they should be examined rather than simply accepted. In a single-party system the citizens have no lawful way of removing those who govern them, no organised opposition may question the government, and dissent carries a personal cost. Whether the stability gained is worth the choice surrendered is precisely the question.
A single-party system must be distinguished carefully from a democracy in which one party keeps winning. In the first, rivals are forbidden. In the second, rivals exist, contest freely, and simply lose.
3.4.3 The Bi-Party System
A bi-party system, or two-party system, is one in which two major parties dominate the contest for power, and one of them normally wins enough seats to govern alone. Smaller parties may exist and even win seats, but they are not serious contenders for office.
The United States, where the Democratic Party and the Republican Party alternate in power, and the United Kingdom, where the Conservative Party and the Labour Party do so, are the usual examples. In both, elections are held under first-past-the-post.
The merits claimed for the system are these.
A clear choice for the voter. The elector chooses between two identifiable alternatives with known programmes, and knows in advance which team a vote will help into office.
Stable single-party government. One party normally holds a majority, so the government need not depend on the shifting support of allies to survive.
Clear accountability. Because one party governs alone, credit and blame cannot be shifted onto coalition partners, and the voter knows exactly whom to reward or punish.
A recognised opposition. The losing party remains a coherent alternative government. In the United Kingdom it forms a Shadow Cabinet, whose members each track a particular minister and are ready to take charge.
A pull towards moderation. Since either party must win over the middle of the electorate to gain a majority, both have an incentive to avoid extreme positions.
Efficient legislative business. A government with a secure majority can carry its programme through the legislature without prolonged bargaining.
3.4.4 The Multi-Party System
A multi-party system is one in which several parties compete seriously for power and no single party is likely to win a majority on its own, so governments are usually formed by coalition.
A coalition is a government formed by two or more parties which agree on a common programme and share ministerial office between them, because none of them commands a majority alone. India, Israel and Italy are commonly cited examples of multi-party systems.
India’s case is distinctive. Alongside national parties there are strong State-level parties built around regional, linguistic and community concerns, and for much of the period since 1989 the Union government has been formed by coalitions or alliances of such parties.
The merits claimed for the system are these.
Broad representation. The many divisions of a diverse society — regional, linguistic, religious, occupational — find a party willing to speak for them.
Wider choice. The voter is not confined to two alternatives and can support a party that matches their views more exactly.
Restraint on the monopolisation of power. A government dependent on partners cannot act as it pleases, since a partner may withdraw support.
Accommodation of regional and minority voices. Parties representing a State or a community can enter the government itself and place their demands on the national agenda.
Government by consensus. Coalition policy must be acceptable to several parties, which tends to produce negotiated rather than imposed decisions.
Higher political participation. More parties campaigning on more issues draw more citizens into political activity.
The three systems have now been described in turn. Table 3.3 places them side by side.
Read across the rows and a pattern appears. As the number of competing parties rises, the voter’s choice widens and the government’s freedom to act narrows. That trade-off is the heart of the argument about party systems, and it is not settled by evidence alone.
3.5 Summary
Franchise, or suffrage, is the right to vote in the election of public representatives. Universal adult franchise is the principle that every adult citizen holds this right, without discrimination by caste, class, religion, gender, race, education or wealth.
‘Universal’ does not mean unlimited. Every system fixes a voting age and certain disqualifications; what it rules out is a qualification that grades adult citizens by political worth.
In India, Article 326 places adult suffrage in the Constitution itself. The voting age was lowered from 21 to 18 by the Sixty-first Constitutional Amendment Act, 1988, and the Election Commission prepares the electoral roll on which the right depends in practice.
India adopted full adult franchise at once in a society with wide social and economic inequality, rather than extending it in stages as older democracies had done.
Universal adult franchise became the accepted standard because it follows from political equality, gives government legitimacy, allows rulers to be changed without violence, includes groups historically shut out, forces parties to address ordinary people, educates the electorate, is recognised internationally as a right, and marked a break from colonial exclusion.
Representation is the arrangement by which citizens choose a few persons to act for them in making law and policy. It is necessary because a large population cannot assemble, and valuable because the representative is accountable downwards to the voters.
Representation is organised territorially through constituencies, which may be single-member or multi-member, and whose boundaries are revised periodically. In India, seats in the Lok Sabha and the State Assemblies are reserved for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes under Articles 330 and 332.
Under the first-past-the-post system the voter marks one candidate in a single-member constituency and the candidate with the largest number of votes wins. A plurality suffices; a majority is not required, so a winner may be opposed by most of the voters.
Because votes are counted seat by seat, first-past-the-post rewards concentrated support and can give a party a share of seats well above its share of votes.
Under proportional representation, seats are allotted to parties in approximate proportion to the votes they poll, which requires multi-member constituencies. Its two principal methods are the list system and the single transferable vote. India uses the single transferable vote for the Rajya Sabha.
A political party is an organised group of citizens with broadly shared views, seeking to capture and exercise governmental power through constitutional means, chiefly by contesting elections. It differs from a pressure group, which seeks to influence policy without taking office, and from a faction, which pursues a sectional interest.
Parties that do not form the government constitute the opposition, whose task is to question, criticise and offer an alternative government.
A party system is the pattern of competition among a country’s parties. Its shape depends on the electoral system and on the social divisions of the country.
A single-party system permits only one party to hold power; its defenders claim stability, rapid decision, continuity of policy, low electoral cost and unity of purpose. It is distinct from one-party dominance, where rivals compete freely but lose.
A bi-party system is dominated by two major parties; its claimed merits are clear voter choice, stable single-party government, clear accountability, a recognised opposition, moderation and efficient legislative business.
A multi-party system has several serious contenders and usually produces coalition governments; its claimed merits are broad representation, wider choice, restraint on the monopolisation of power, accommodation of regional and minority voices, government by consensus and higher participation.
The Arguments In One Place
The chapter’s central claim is that the rules of election are never merely technical. Deciding who may vote, how votes become seats, and how many parties may realistically compete is deciding who holds power.
Against this stands a persistent counter-argument, heard from the earliest debates on the franchise onwards: that government requires knowledge, decisiveness and continuity, and that widening the franchise and multiplying the parties buys representation at the cost of effective rule.
Neither position can be settled by evidence alone, because the disagreement rests on a value judgement — whether a political system should be measured first by how well it reflects the governed, or first by how well it governs.
The chapter takes no side. It asks the student to notice that every electoral rule they will meet, from the ballot unit of a voting machine to the formation of a coalition, is an answer somebody once argued for.
3.6 Key Terms
Bi-party system — A party system in which two major parties dominate the contest for power and one of them normally governs alone.
Coalition — A government formed by two or more parties which share office on an agreed programme because none of them has a majority alone.
Constituency — A defined electoral area whose registered voters together elect a representative, or representatives, to a legislature.
Electoral roll — The official list of registered voters prepared for each constituency; a citizen not on the roll cannot vote.
Faction — A group within a party or legislature that pursues a sectional interest of its own.
First-past-the-post system — An electoral system in which the voter marks one candidate in a single-member constituency and the candidate with the largest number of votes is elected.
Franchise — The right to vote in the election of public representatives.
Legitimacy — The general acceptance that a government has the right to rule.
List system — A method of proportional representation in which voters choose between ranked party lists and seats are filled from each list in proportion to the votes polled.
Multi-party system — A party system in which several parties compete seriously for power and governments are usually formed by coalition.
Opposition — The parties in a legislature that are not in government, whose task is to question, criticise and offer an alternative.
Party system — The pattern of interaction and competition among the political parties of a country.
Plurality — The largest number of votes among the candidates, whether or not it is more than half the votes cast.
Political equality — The principle that each citizen’s political voice counts equally, whatever their wealth or status.
Political party — An organised group of citizens with broadly shared views who seek to capture and exercise governmental power through constitutional means.
Pressure group — An organised body that seeks to influence government policy in a particular field without seeking to form the government.
Proportional representation — An electoral system in which seats are allotted to parties in approximate proportion to the votes they receive.
Representation — The arrangement by which citizens choose a small number of persons to act and speak for them in making law and policy.
Secret ballot — A method of voting in which the voter’s choice is recorded privately and cannot be inspected by others.
Single-party system — A party system in which only one party is permitted to hold effective power and no rival may compete for it.
Single transferable vote — A method of proportional representation in which voters rank candidates and surplus or unused votes are transferred to later preferences.
Suffrage — Another word for the right to vote; used interchangeably with franchise.
Universal adult franchise — The principle that every adult citizen has the right to vote, without discrimination by caste, class, religion, gender, race, education or wealth.
3.7 Points to Ponder
If a citizen’s name is missing from the electoral roll, does that citizen still possess the right to vote? What does the answer tell us about the difference between holding a right and being able to use it?
A candidate wins a seat with 36 per cent of the votes polled. In what sense is that candidate the representative of the other 64 per cent?
Universal adult franchise gives every voter equal weight at the polling booth. Does it also give them equal influence over what governments actually do?
Would a country with a hundred small parties, each perfectly representing a slice of opinion, be more democratic than one with two large parties? What is the test you are using to decide?
Party discipline requires a legislator to vote with the party even when their own view differs. Is that a betrayal of the voters who elected the person, or the very thing those voters chose?
If the rules for turning votes into seats can change which party governs, who should be allowed to change those rules?
3.8 Objective Questions
- Universal adult franchise is best described as the right to vote extended to: [1 mark]
- all citizens who own property or pay taxes
- all adult citizens, without discrimination by caste, class, religion, gender or education
- all persons resident in a country, whether citizens or not
- all citizens who have completed formal schooling
- Under the first-past-the-post system, a candidate is declared elected on securing: [1 mark]
- more than half of the votes polled
- two-thirds of the votes polled
- the largest number of votes among the candidates
- a fixed quota calculated before the count
- The single transferable vote system is used in India for elections to the: [1 mark]
- Lok Sabha
- State Legislative Assemblies
- Rajya Sabha
- municipal wards
- Assertion (A): Under universal adult franchise, a government can be changed without violence. [1 mark] Reason (R): Every adult citizen holds a vote by which an unpopular government may be removed at the next election.
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true, but R is false.
- A is false, but R is true.
- Assertion (A): Proportional representation cannot be applied in single-member constituencies. [1 mark] Reason (R): A single seat cannot be divided among parties in proportion to the votes they poll.
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true, but R is false.
- A is false, but R is true.
- Match the term in Column A with its description in Column B: [1 mark]
| Column A | Column B |
|---|---|
| a. Pressure group | i. The official list of registered voters of a constituency |
| b. Coalition | ii. A government of two or more parties sharing office |
| c. Plurality | iii. A body seeking to influence policy without taking office |
| d. Electoral roll | iv. The largest number of votes, majority not required |
Fill in the blank: The Constitution lowered the voting age in India from 21 to 18 through the ________ Constitutional Amendment Act, 1988. [1 mark]
State whether the following is true or false: In a single-party system, opposition parties contest elections freely but consistently lose. [1 mark]
3.9 Check Your Concepts
Define universal adult franchise. [2 marks]
What is a constituency? Give one example of the kind of constituency used for Lok Sabha elections. [2 marks]
State any two reasons for the widespread acceptance of universal adult franchise. [2 marks]
Differentiate between a political party and a pressure group. [3 marks]
Explain briefly why a plurality is not the same as a majority in the first-past-the-post system. [3 marks]
Distinguish between a single-party system and one-party dominance within a competitive system, with reference to India. [3 marks]
Explain, with an example, how a party may win a large share of seats with a much smaller share of votes. [4 marks]
Describe the meaning of proportional representation and name its two principal methods. [4 marks]
Evaluate the claim that ‘the vote is worth little unless the voter’s name is on the electoral roll’. [4 marks]
Explain the meaning of a political party and discuss the features that distinguish it from other organised groups. [6 marks]
Compare the merits claimed for the bi-party system with those claimed for the multi-party system. [6 marks]
Discuss the reasons why universal adult franchise came to be accepted as the standard of a democratic state, with reference to India. [6 marks]
3.10 Source & Passage-Based Questions
- Read the extract and answer the questions that follow. [6 marks] “Party is a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.” — Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, 1770
- Which two features of a political party does this definition insist upon? [2 marks]
- Why might a critic of parties say that this definition assumes what it ought to prove? [2 marks]
- State one thing this extract cannot tell us about how parties actually behave. [2 marks]
- Study the described cartoon and answer the questions that follow. [6 marks] A cartoon shows a running track. Four runners have crossed the finishing line almost together, but only the runner a step ahead is being handed the entire prize, while a caption beneath reads that the others carried most of the crowd’s support.
- Which electoral system is the cartoonist commenting on? [1 mark]
- Explain the criticism the cartoon is making. [3 marks]
- State what a single cartoon cannot establish about that electoral system. [2 marks]
- Read the situation and answer the questions that follow. [6 marks] In a State Legislative Assembly of 200 seats, no party wins a majority. Party A wins 84 seats, Party B wins 71, and three smaller regional parties win 45 between them. After ten days of negotiation, Party B forms the government with two of the regional parties, agreeing to a shared programme and dividing ministries among them.
- Identify the kind of party system at work and the kind of government formed. [2 marks]
- Explain why the party with the largest number of seats is not in office. [2 marks]
- State one merit claimed for this arrangement. [2 marks]
- Read the situation and answer the questions that follow. [4 marks] A first-time voter of eighteen goes to a polling station on election day with an identity document, but finds that her name does not appear on the list held by the polling officer. She is not permitted to vote.
- Which right does she hold, and which requirement has not been met? [2 marks]
- Explain what this case shows about the difference between a right and its exercise. [2 marks]
3.11 Practice With Data
- In a single-member constituency, 80,000 valid votes are polled among four candidates: W receives 26,000, X receives 24,000, Y receives 19,000 and Z receives 11,000. [4 marks]
- Who is declared elected, and under which electoral system? [1 mark]
- Calculate the winner’s share of the votes polled, showing your working. [2 marks]
- State what proportion of voters supported a candidate other than the winner. [1 mark]
- The table below gives the votes polled by three parties in an election to a 100-seat assembly. [4 marks] | Party | Share of votes polled (per cent) | |—|—| | Party P | 40 | | Party Q | 35 | | Party R | 25 |
- How many seats would each party hold under a perfectly proportional system? [2 marks]
- Explain why the actual result under first-past-the-post is unlikely to match your answer. [2 marks]