Complexity of Party Competitiveness in Lok-Sabha Elections A Case Study in Electoral Geography

To measure the party competition, the methods which developed by Western countries cannot be applicable to the Indian political system, because Indian party system is more complicated then the Western party system, where two party system exist. In Indian case, it is not necessarily the national parties, but other regional or local parties also enter in the fray. These regional parties gave a tough competition to the major parties at state levels, if not at the national. The pattern of changing party strength over time from one place to another is the considerable interest of the electoral geographers. Their main concern is to analyse the gains and losses with spatial perspective, and also make an attempt to delineate the pockets of high competition or having without any competition. In Indian case, there is no uniformity in trends, but there are spatial variations among different socio-cultural groups in their degree of loyalty to the particular party, because their local interests sometimes taken edge over the national issues. Our aim in the present study is to measure party competitiveness among the parties in Parliamentary elections.