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Abstract
While the transformation of the Indian party system from a predominant party system to a highly fragmented multi-party system has been investigated, less attention has been paid to the political consequences of this change. By analysing an original data set, this paper investigates how the fragmentation of the Indian party system has affected the stability of Indian legislatures, their ability to legislate, and the quality of the law-making process. The analysis reveals that as fragmentation increased, legislatures became more unstable, produced less legislation, and the quality of the law-making process declined. The paper further suggests that these changes may be the reason that Indian voters may have less confidence in parliament.
Notes
Tsebelis Citation(2002) has noted in fact that as fragmentation increases, so does the number of veto players, and such an increase, in turn, leads to a greater production of low-quality laws and to a lower production of high-quality legislation.
The only exceptions, to the best of our knowledge, are represented by the parliament of Kiribati and Palau, where there are no parties.
Sartori Citation(1976) suggested that a party should be discounted as irrelevant if it did not have any coalition or blackmail potential. A party, for Sartori, has no coalitional potential if it never joins a government coalition or if it is never necessary to the formation of a government coalition. A party is said instead to have blackmail potential either if it affects, through its existence, the direction of competition or if it can prevent the formation of a government.
If one assumed that more durable legislatures have a higher legislative output than briefer legislatures, because the legislative process is time-consuming and therefore more laws will be produced at the end rather than at the beginning of a legislature, one should expect that the average number of laws produced on yearly basis should be higher for more durable legislatures than for less durable ones. The evidence presented in questions the validity of this assumption.
This finding was later confirmed by Pelizzo and Babones Citation(2001).
This is the size of the largest party relative to the size of the legislature that grew from 489 seats in the first legislature (1952–57) to 543 (from 1991 onward). When we correlate the absolute size of the largest party, that is its total number of parliamentary seats, with the number of laws produced in each legislature, the correlation analysis yields an even stronger coefficient (r = 0.723).
When we regress the number of laws per legislature against the size of the largest party and the duration of the legislature, we find that the model explains 89.3% of the variance in the number of laws produced; that the size of the largest party has a stronger impact on the number of laws produced (b = 167.795) than the duration of the legislature (b = 65.664). Both regression coefficients are statistically significant.
One could argue that it is only when the law-making progress becomes more careful and when the analysis of legislation becomes more time-consuming that the parliament passes fewer but better laws. The analyses performed by the PRS Legislative Research show instead that over the past few years, the amount of time devoted to reading, amending, and voting on legislation has dramatically declined. The report on ‘Legislative activity in parliament’ produced by PRS (2008) indicated that: ‘in 2007 30–40% of the Bills were passed without significant debate, (…) in 2007 the Lok Sabha passed 41% of the Bills (not including financial Bills) with little or no discussion, (…) in the last three years the percentage of Bills passed with almost no discussion increased from 17% to 41%. During the same period, the number of Bills on which substantial debate (2 hrs +) took place reduced from 39% in 2005 to 24% in 2007.’ The report indicated that this trend is not a peculiarity of the lower chamber but it can also be observed in the Rajya Sabha. The report can be found at the following address: http://www.prsindia.org/administrator/uploads/general/1241757164~~Legislative%20activity%20in%20Parliament.pdf
This conclusion is corroborated by another set of findings: the percentage of respondents reporting to have no confidence at all in the parliament increased from 10.3% in 1990 to 11.5% in 1995 and to 16.2% in 2001. Similarly, the percentage of respondents indicating to have no confidence at all in political parties increased from 17% in 1990 to 19.3% in 1995 to 28% in 2001. While Indian public opinion did not become increasingly polarised on whether and to what extent parties and parliaments could be trusted, it became more polarised as to whether the government was trustworthy. In fact, while the percentage of respondents reporting to have a great deal or some confidence in the government increased, as shown in , the proportion of respondents reporting to have no confidence at all in the executive increased from 13.8% in 1990 to 14.8% in 1998 to 15.2% in 2001. While this finding does not alter our conclusion that the government legitimacy was not undermined as much as that of parties and parliaments, it shows that it is nonetheless affected by how effective the legislative process is.
Though a survey conducted by CNN-IBN showed that while the proportion of Indian respondents indicating that ‘democracy is preferable to any other form of government’ was 49% in 2005 and 41% in 2009, the percentage of Indian respondents indicating that ‘in certain situations a dictatorial government is preferable’ had increased from 6% to 12%. See http://ibnlive.in.com/news/ceotype-leaders-clean-politicos-for-india/83737-3.html
See note 5.
See Huntington's (Citation1991: 49–50) observation on negative legitimacy.