How to Win a Majority

There is a sea of orange in the map below, indicating the seats the BJP won in the just concluded elections:

A lot of people were curious as to the vote share of the BJP nation-wide. Did they win a proportional number of votes? Or did they just get votes in places they won and did not have any “wasted” votes? (Here, a “wasted” vote is one cast in an electoral district where the party did not win). Equally, was the return of a single party majority a sign of the end of regional parties, at least at the national level? Was this the beginning of the move to a two party system?

Good questions. Surprisingly, the first answer I saw to these questions was in the Washington Post by a non-Indian guy named Adam Ziegfeld! So what are the answers?

The BJP’s vote share this time was just 31%. In contrast, the Congress despite getting decimated got 19%. It was the distribution of votes that mattered: the BJP hardly had any “wasted” votes. To understand how “useful” every BJP vote was, look at the numbers from the last election where the Congress got 29% and the BJP got 18%. The Congress came nowhere near an absolute majority and the BJP was still the second largest party by far.

The above also means regional parties are still alive and kicking: they got 50% vote share this time too, same as last time. It just didn’t translate into as many seats. To those who might blame India’s first-past-the-post system for the skewed outcome, Ziegfeld reminds us that the Indian system is the “same system used in American, British, and Canadian legislative elections”.

Next, how much did the BJP’s vote share increase on a per-state basis? The figure below tells the answer:
Ziegfeld summarizes the graph above perfectly:
“Across the board, the BJP improved its performance. However, its performance improved most in states where it was already fairly competitive.”
UP is a case in point: a 42% vote share in UP translated into a 90% seat share. And as Ziegfeld points out, until now:
“no party had won a legislative majority with less than 40 percent of the vote.”
The BJP just did it with 31%. Did Modi and Co plan this to perfection with a targeted campaign that almost seems to have had a military precision? Ah, but that’s a different topic…

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