India’s 2009 Elections: The Resilience of Regionalism and Ethnicity

The 2009 Indian general elections saw the Congress Party-led United Progressive Alliance retain power, with a remarkable increase of seats in the National Assembly (Lok Sabha), leading to claims of a ‘re-nationalization’ of the party system as well as of the voting pattern. However, evidence from the results themselves show that, on the contrary, the process of fragmentation of the party system and the electorate is still progressing, Indian voters having opted for regional and local players more than they ever did before. The distorting effect of the majority electoral system (‘First Past The Post’) provides the central explanation for this apparent paradox. A close look at the electoral results also demonstrates the resilience of ‘ethnic voting’, despite the recurring discourse on the predominance of ‘economic voting’.