First past the post system - about time we got past it ?

India being a multiparty democracy, one would think that the average Indian voter is spoilt for choice. There are a multitude of registered political parties, representing pretty much the entire demographic & social landscape of the country. These parties operate at different levels – some at a state or regional level, others are national. To look at a comprehensive list of all registered political parties (about 800 !)in India, see here.

One would think every political view would be accommodated in India’s multiparty democracy, where the aspirations of its peoples of different region, caste, race, language & religion can be voiced & would be heard. This, unfortunately, is not quite so because of a faulty voting method.

India follows the Westminster model of parliamentary democracy, where the electorate elects members into the parliament at the national level & legislatures at the state level, and they in turn elect the Prime Minister & the Chief Minister for the country & state respectively. The Prime Minister / Chief Minister then chooses his council of ministers to work along with him in the government & they work with collective responsibility. A good article on the basic structure of the Indian Government is here.

Now the critical part in the whole system of Indian democracy is how the directly elected legislators actually win an election. India follows the system of the ‘First past the post’ or FPTP, where the candidate polling the most number of votes (irrespective of whether that constitutes a majority or not) wins. FPTP is described really well here & here. A specific explanation of why FPTP was chosen and is applied in India is found here. The article also talks about how FPTP has historically ensured stable governments in India (till 1977) and also talks about distortions that came about due to FPTP in 1977, 1989 & 1996 where the ruling Congress party lost heavily despite not doing so badly in terms of proportion of votes.

FPTP system is one of the simplest systems of voting, and is especially useful in cases where the elctorate is largely illiterate and cannot understand fairer but more complex systems of voting. A good explanation of the advantages & disadvantages of FPTP is given here.

The advantages of FPTP are

• FPTP is fast & cheap to implement (vital for India's grand scale of elections)
• Easy to understand (Close to half of India's electorate remains illiterate)
• Eliminates extremist viewpoints from mainstream electoral politics (the reason why y0u would never see a Lashkar-e-Taiyba candidate standing in elections)

The disadvantages of FPTP are that it leads to

• Elimination of perfectly reasonable minority viewpoints as well, gradually leading to a two-party electoral system. See Duverger's law.
• FPTP also leads to disproportionality of representation (number of seats won is not in line with proportion of votes polled)
• Regionalism - Strong regional parties in concentrated areas emerging relatively stronger than broad-based national parties
• Tactical voting to ensure that 'lesser evil' candidates win
• Safe seats for politicians where a significant minority ensures that the majority of voters never get a representative elected
• Wipeouts & Clean sweeps are possible with small changes in proportion of votes polles
• Elective dictatorships - Massive majority in the parliament (in terms of seats) even with minority vote share
• Wasted votes - Not all votes need to be counted to determine the winner, especially if a candidate takes an assailable lead in the first few rounds of counting. This leads to wasted votes & feeling of disenfranchisement.
• Abstentation - A large portion of the electorate might believe their vote does not matter, especially in the cases of safe seats, leading to a feeling of disenfrachisement.
• FPTP allows Gerrymandering, i.e. redistricting of constituencies to suit political purposes

The disadvantages of FPTP are far too serious & far too many to be ignored any longer. The argument most often forwarded in the support of FPTP is that its the simplest method & any other method of voting would be too complicated for the large illiterate population of the country to understand. However, India's poor & illiterate largely remian disenfranchised even with FPTP either due to caste / religious leaders inciting them to vote for a particular party or due to abstentation. There has been significant debate in some countries whether its time to look beyond the FPTP, especially in the UK. Jenkins Commission was set up in UK in 1997 to propose alternative & fairer methods of voting. The recommendation, however, has not been accepted.

To understand what would be a good alternative to FPTP, it would be useful to take a look at other voting methods, the theory & maths behind them. Voting systems across the world are listed here. Arrow's impossibility theorem (Nobel Prize for Economics, 1972) demonstrates that no voting system can be perfect, as aggregation of a multitude of preferences is always going to result in a degree of irrationality & unfairness.

In India the First Past The Post system has led to the following -

• Regionalism - Strong regional parties have emerged, undermining the strength of broad-based national parties. Regional issues have become more important electoral issues than those of national importance.
• Two-party system - Duverger's law (see above) is being proven right as India moves from a multi-party democracy to loose coalitions to two large & somewhat cohesive coalitions with clearly identifiable & distinguishable social, economic & foreign policies. Even at the state level, multi-cornered contests are fast becoming rare
• Tactical voting is being seen especially in states where the elections are fought more on the lines of caste & religion than on development, e.g. 'Keep those communal guys out at any cost', 'Laloo should be defeated at all costs'; elections being reduced to 'vote against' politics rather than 'vote for'
• Wipeouts & Clean sweeps - Especially in the state of Tamil Nadu, where the entire electorate is deeply divided between the two major political parties
• Elective dictatorships - Nehru ruled with significant majority all through, there was not enough political opposition to his social & economic policies in his time. A stronger opposition (in terms of seats in the Lok Sabha) might have prevented some of his mistakes from happening. Indira Gandhi (1971-75) and Rajiv Gandhi (1984-89) ruled with such massive majority but failed miserably. Indira Gandhi had imposed Emergency by the end of her term; Rajiv Gandhi lost badly in 1989 due to Bofors & other reasons to be out of office.
• Safe seats - Bellary, Amethi, Rai Bareily have remained Congress bastions, irrespective of local or national issues, candidate fielded etc. Similarly several seats for other national & regional parties, where consecutive elections have returned the candidate of the same party, irrespective of the candidate & issues.
• Gerrymandering - In India, the exercise of delimitation of constituencies is now on. Though sufficient safeguards have been provided in the Delimitation Act, I would not be surprised if allegations fly thick & fast of politically-motivated actions by the Delimitation Commission.

FPTP, the cheapest of the voting methods around today, still costs about Rs. 1000 crores (about US$ 225 million) for a general election. FPTP is no longer fast either, as due to massive criminalization of politics, general elections are often spread over more than a month to manage the logistics of massive armed forces depolyment to ensure free & fair elections. Elimination of extremist views from electoral politics has actually proved counterproductive, as such agenices have now resorted to alternative (almost always violent) methods of ensuring that their voice is heard.

Though FPTP is supposed to lead to stable governments, coalition politics in India has ensured most governments are too pre-occupied with self-sustenance to bother about mundane things like good governance & development. In the last 16 years, India has had 9* governments, only 2** of which managed to last their entire term. Not once did any political party or pre-poll alliance achieve simple majority in 6 general elections since 1989. Coalition governments always pay the 'democracy tax' on their performance.

This shows that FPTP has not been able to provide stability to the nation, has not come cheap & has not been fast. An alternative system, either a variant of Proportional Representation (PR) or a Run-off method of voting would atleast be a lot fairer to the electorate than FPTP and would provide the necessary voice to India's significant minority.

* The 9 governments are those headed by V P Singh, Chandrashekhar, P V Narasimha Rao, A B Vajpayee, H D Devegowda, I K Gujral, A B Vajpayee, A B Vajpayee & Manmohan Singh. Manmohan Singh-led government is currently in office.

** The 2 governments that completed their terms were those headed by P V Narasimha Rao (1991-96) & the third government formed by A B Vajpayee (1999-2004).