Psephological Metrics suggests that SP-Congress Alliance is Unstoppable
Wednesday, February 15, 2017
This is an interesting article by LiveMint that argues that from a psephological point of view, the probability of SP-Congress Alliance being defeated this election cycle is extremely remote.
The article further
argues that should such an alliance was in play; they would have
swept the last three previous assembly elections as well. This is because they
were basically four cornered contests and accordingly the vote share threshold
needed to win the state is low viz 28-30%. In the last elections in 2012, the
Samajwadi Party got just 29% of the votes, yet ended up with a comfortable 223
out of 403 seats. Five years earlier, the BSP with just over 30% of the votes
won 205 seats.
Once the contests
take a three cornered character, the vote share threshold substantially increases
viz 35-40%. In the 1998 general elections,
for example, the BJP managed to win 58 out of the 85 seats in the then
undivided state with only 36% of the vote. In the 2014 general elections, the
BJP won 42% of the votes, and nearly 90% of the seats (71 out of 80). In fact,
in 2012, if the Samajwadi Party and the Congress had got together, the alliance
would have got a whopping three-fourths majority in the House, with 317 seats.
That suggests that
it would need a significant vote swing away from the alliance in order for it
not to get an absolute majority. The extent of this required vote swing is a
function of which other party manages to capture these votes. For the BJP to
win this time, it needs to attract a whopping 11% from the alliance; for BSP to
win in needs to attract at least 7% swing towards it from the alliance.
For
swings as large as 7-11%, a party needs a wave in its favour, which neither BSP
nor BJP has at the moment. In short, the SP-Congress is unstoppable from the
context of probability, though nothing is impossible as a surprise the ballot
box can often hold when open.
To read the full article:
HERE
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