Parliamentary Elections and Ruling Parties: Evidence from India

Abstract

In an election the probability that a ruling party wins the election and forms the government is affected by the electoral system that is, the rule for aggregating constituency wise results into a single outcome (i.e. forming the central government). We find the probability that a particular party wins the election from a constituency given that party has won the last election from that particular constituency, under the assumption that all candidates are equally likely (i.e. random selection) given that they are from the same party. The original goal of our work is to estimate the probability of winning by ruling party (i.e. the party which has won the last election from that constituency), irrespective of whether that party forms a coalition during election, formed the last government in center or was the part of the last central government in case of coalition government. In particular, we are not taking into account the effect of the central government's ruling, while we are emphasizing on the effect of constituency wise ruling and the results of that particular constituency. We estimate the average probability of winning for all India's General elections from 1971 to 1999 under given electoral system, using Binary Choice Model.

Keywords: coalition, electoral system, ruling party

JEL Classification: C25, N45