Revision summary
Duverger links FPTP to two-party district logic and PR to many parties. Lipset and Rokkan link parties to social cleavages; the South adds caste, language, and religion. Regionally concentrated groups make Indian FPTP nationally multi-party. Huntington flags mobilisation without institutions as a party-system risk. Clientelism and personalism fill the same rules with weaker organisations.
Model answer
Copper italics in this answer — like this — are the key facts. Each one is unpacked in the Facts & figures rail.
Introduction
Party systems in developing countries are not copies of nineteenth-century Europe. They are products of electoral rules and of social splits that elections organise. Maurice Duverger and Seymour Martin Lipset still supply the two levers.
Body
Electoral systems as the first shaper
- Duverger’s law: first-past-the-post in single-member seats tends toward two large parties at the district level. Proportional representation tends toward many parties.
- Mechanical effects discard small vote-shares. Psychological effects teach voters and elites not to waste a ticket.
- Presidential rules, thresholds, and federal chambers add further mechanical pressure.
- In developing countries, poorly drawn seats, incumbency machines, and weak election commissions can warp the same rule.
Social cleavages as the second shaper
- Lipset and Stein Rokkan mapped European parties onto frozen cleavages: class, church, centre–periphery, and land–industry.
- Developing countries add caste, tribe, language, religion, and urban–rural splits that colonial rule often froze into law.
- Ethnic census voting, as in many African and South Asian cases, can turn PR into a parliament of communities and FPTP into a coalition of regional notables.
- Samuel Huntington warned that rapid mobilisation of new cleavages without strong institutions produces praetorian politics, not a stable party system.
How the two interact
- FPTP plus many ethnic groups can still yield a multi-party national system, as in India, because groups are regionally concentrated. District two-party logic and national fragmentation sit together.
- The Congress system aggregated cleavages inside one dominant party. After it, social engineering and State parties followed the cleavage map more openly.
- Giovanni Sartori’s distinction between polarised pluralism and moderate pluralism travels: ideological distance and anti-system parties matter as much as the raw count.
Developing-country specifics
- Parties are often personal and weakly institutionalised. Electoral rules then amplify families, not programmes.
- Military vetoes and one-party independence movements delay the Duverger–Lipset sequence.
- Clientelism uses the ballot to trade goods along cleavage lines rather than to freeze a class cleavage in a social-democratic party.
Net pattern
- Electoral systems set the number and size of viable labels. Cleavages set what the labels mean. Developing party systems are the product, not a European delay.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD ES[Electoral system] --> N[Number of viable parties] CL[Social cleavages] --> I[Identity of parties] N --> PS[Party system] I[I] --> PS[PS] H[Huntington mobilisation] -.strains.-> PS
Conclusion
Electoral systems mechanically and psychologically ration seats. Social cleavages supply the identities that fill those seats. In developing countries the mix is regionalised ethnicity, weak party organisation, and rules inherited from colonial or independence bargains. Duverger and Lipset still explain the levers. Huntington explains the strain.
Quick related
Students also ask
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What is globalisation? Why is there an intense debate about globalisation and its consequences?
Next question on this syllabus topic (2021 · Q3(b)). View answer →
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Does FPTP always produce two parties in the developing world?
No. Regional cleavages and federalism produce many State parties under the same FPTP, as in India.
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Can electoral reform freeze ethnic conflict?
Rules can force vote-pooling. They cannot invent a class cleavage where the census is ethnic. Design must fit the split.
Same topic · past papers
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2022 · Q2(a) · PSIR GS 2 · 20 marks
How has the electoral democracy augmented the participation of people in the democratic process?
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