Abstract
The party system in India for about twenty years since independence was ‘one party dominance’ by the Congress party with the small parties around it. Since the end of the 1980s, the power of the Congress party has declined and the influence of non-Congress parties has increased. In recent years there is a strong tendency toward the multiparty system in India.
In this study, I analyzed the characteristics and the mechanism of the tendency toward the multiparty system in the House of the People in India. From the analyses of the results of eleven general elections from 1952 to 1996, I have discovered three matters. (1) The tendency toward the multiparty system has been confirmed by using the index of ‘Effective Number of Parties’ and by comparing the seats obtained by each party. (2) This tendency has been caused by the regional concentration of the power of each party. (3) Two kinds of parties have contributed to the regional concentration of the power of each party: the regional parties and the ‘nominal’ national parties.
It is possible to explain that the reason of this tendency is the change of the relationship between the society and the politics in India since the end of the 1960s. To examine ‘how’ these two variables are related will be the problem in the next study.
