Explain the impact of electoral systems and cleavages in shaping party systems with reference to developing countries

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.