Edges of the Nation: Party System Divergence and Political Representation in Mountain India

Devesh Marwah and Aniket Alam

Studies in Indian Politics, 2025, vol. 13, issue 2, 257-276

Abstract: India is a well-known exception to Duverger’s Law, which states that single-member plurality electoral systems typically lead to a two-party dominance, due to strong regional parties. We hypothesize that this India-level phenomenon is overly dominated by electoral data from densely populated regions like the Indo-Gangetic plains. Drawing on anthropological and historical scholarship, we postulate that mountain societies behave differently. To test our hypothesis, we perform a quantitative analysis on electoral data comparing India’s Himalayan states to those in the Gangetic and Brahmaputra plains. The results indicate that the plains are diverging while the mountain states are converging towards Duverger’s two-party equilibrium. This suggests that India’s mountain and plains states have a structural dissimilarity in their political culture, which supports the anthropological and historical literature from which we started. We hope to add both to the literature on electoral studies and to mountain societies and regional studies.

Keywords: Duverger’s law; comparative politics; mountain societies; Zomia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23210230251374814 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:indpol:v:13:y:2025:i:2:p:257-276

DOI: 10.1177/23210230251374814

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Studies in Indian Politics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().