Comment: Proportional representation. (1996, 20 Marks)
Proportional representation (PR) is the family of electoral systems that allocates seats to parties roughly in proportion to their votes, so that a legislature mirrors opinion rather than rewarding whoever finishes first locally. The idea took modern shape in Thomas Hare‘s Treatise on the Election of Representatives (1859), and John Stuart Mill championed it in Considerations on Representative Government (1861) as the cure for majorities that silence minorities. India uses it for indirect elections but rejected it for the Lok Sabha, a choice still argued over.
The main forms
| System | Mechanism | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| List PR | Multi-member districts; parties win seats by vote share and fill them from ranked lists; a threshold curbs fragmentation | Israel (3.25%), the Netherlands |
| Single transferable vote (STV) | Voters rank candidates; a quota elects; surplus and eliminated votes transfer | Ireland |
| Mixed-member proportional (MMP) | Two votes, one for a constituency, one for a party; list seats top up the result to proportionality | Germany, New Zealand |
Maurice Duverger, in Political Parties (1951), argued that plurality rule tends towards two parties while PR tends towards multipartism. Arend Lijphart‘s Patterns of Democracy (1999) found that PR-based consensus democracies govern as well as majoritarian ones, and more inclusively.
India’s partial use
- STV elects the Rajya Sabha and the state legislative councils (Articles 80(4) and 171(4)).
- The President and Vice-President are also chosen by “proportional representation by means of the single transferable vote” (Articles 55(3) and 66(1)). For a single office, though, the mechanism works as a preferential majority system with weighted votes, not true proportionality.
Why the Constituent Assembly rejected it
In January 1949, K. T. Shah, Kazi Syed Karimuddin and Mahboob Ali Baig moved amendments for PR. They argued that it would protect minorities without separate electorates and give India a real opposition. The majority cited mass illiteracy, unwieldy multi-member constituencies and the fear that a fragmented House would destabilise a fledgling parliamentary government. First past the post (FPTP) in territorial constituencies, with reserved seats, was chosen instead.
The FPTP distortion
- 1984: the Congress won over 400 seats on about 49% of the vote.
- 2014: the BJP won a majority, 282 seats, on 31.3%; the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) polled about 4% and won nothing.
- Uttar Pradesh 2017: the BJP took 312 of 403 seats on roughly 40%. The BSP’s 22% returned 19 seats.
- Plurality rewards concentrated support and punishes dispersed support, so thinly spread minorities are chronic losers.
Reform proposals
- Law Commission, 170th Report (1999): add 25% more seats to the Lok Sabha and the assemblies, filled from party lists, with a 5% vote threshold. This is a partial, German-style list tier, not wholesale PR.
- The delimitation debate: the freeze on seat allocation ends with the census after 2026. The 131st Amendment Bill 2026 (850 seats) was defeated on 17 April 2026 amid southern fears of losing seats. A list tier is canvassed as a way to avoid a zero-sum redistribution between states.
Limits
- Instability: in a society with many cleavages, PR could entrench caste and community parties and make coalitions permanent.
- Party oligarchy: closed lists hand selection to leaders, sharpening Robert Michels‘s iron law of oligarchy in parties without internal democracy.
- No constituency link, which Indian voters prize.
- FPTP has adapted: it produced coalition-era multipartism, defying a strict reading of Duverger’s law.
Conclusion
PR wins on fairness, FPTP on stability and constituency accountability. India’s real problem is the size of the winner’s bonus, not FPTP as such. The measured course is the 170th Report’s mixed model: a thresholded list tier that corrects the worst distortions while keeping the single-member constituency. It should be paired with intra-party democracy, so that the lists do not simply become the leaders’ patronage.