Explaining First-Past-The-Post And Its Democratic Faultlines: Lessons From The Bihar Election

The 2025 Bihar Assembly election has renewed attention on India's First Past the Post (FPTP) electoral system, exposing once again the gap between voter preference and legislative representation. The outcome where the party with the highest vote share finished a distant third in seats provides a striking case study of how FPTP structurally distorts the democratic mandate. Understanding these distortions requires revisiting what FPTP is, how it functions, and why its design produces outcomes that often fail to reflect the popular will.

Understanding the First Past the Post System

India's electoral system is based on the FPTP model inherited from Westminster. Under this system, each constituency elects one representative, and the candidate with the highest number of votes wins, regardless of whether they secure a majority. FPTP is simple to administer and easy for voters to understand. Yet it operates on a principle of plurality rather than majority, meaning that even a candidate who secures far less than half the votes can win if no other candidate receives more. This structure creates a winner-takes-all mechanism in each constituency. While efficient in producing decisive outcomes, it does not ensure that the distribution of seats in a legislature mirrors the distribution of votes across the electorate. It is this mismatch that was vividly on display in Bihar.

What the Bihar Election Revealed

The Bihar 2025 results highlight the most recurrent flaw of FPTP: the vote–seat distortion. The official results show that the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) secured the largest share of votes statewide, around 23 percent, yet won only 25 seats in the 243-seat Assembly. In contrast, the Bharatiya Janata Party and Janata Dal (United), with lower individual vote shares (approximately 20 percent and 19 percent), together secured 174 seats enough to form a comfortable majority. This disproportionality did not arise from electoral malpractice or sudden political swings; it flowed directly from how FPTP translates votes into seats. A party that loses narrowly across many constituencies gains nothing, while a party that wins narrowly in a cluster of constituencies accumulates significant legislative power. The Bihar results thus reveal a pattern in which popular support is not the decisive factorgeographical concentration is.

Disproportionate Outcomes and Manufactured Majorities

One of the most significant consequences of FPTP is the creation of what scholars describe as “manufactured majorities.” This occurs when a party or coalition secures a majority of seats without securing a majority of votes. In Bihar, the BJP–JD(U) alliance commands nearly three-fourths of the Assembly despite receiving less than 40 percent of the total vote. Such outcomes may be constitutionally valid, but they raise deeper questions about political legitimacy. A system that exaggerates limited vote shares into overwhelming parliamentary control creates misalignments between public opinion and legislative authority. These distortions are amplified in a state like Bihar, where elections are often multi-cornered. In numerous constituencies, the winning candidate received as little as 30 to 35 percent of the vote. This means that a majority of voters in each of those constituencies preferred someone else. FPTP thus routinely produces representatives who lack majority consent, even within their own constituencies.

Vote Splitting and Fragmented Representation

The Bihar election also illustrates another persistent flaw of FPTP its vulnerability to vote splitting. When several candidates appeal to similar social or ideological constituencies, they divide the vote base, allowing another candidate to win with a small plurality. This dynamic was visible in multiple districts, where parties representing overlapping caste blocs split votes in a way that enabled their opponents to win despite limited support. Vote splitting under FPTP discourages voters from making expressive choices. Instead of voting for the candidate they prefer, voters are pressured to vote strategically to prevent their least preferred candidate from winning. This results in distorted democratic expression and incentivises parties to build narrow caste or community coalitions rather than broad-based platforms.

Structural Barriers to Social Representation

FPTP also reinforces longstanding social hierarchies by shaping parties' candidate selection strategies. Because the system rewards “winnability,” parties overwhelmingly nominate individuals perceived as having established vote banks—typically dominant caste men. Bihar's 2025 results reflect this entrenched pattern, with marginalised groups, Pasmanda Muslims, Extremely Backward Castes (EBCs), and women remaining underrepresented. The problem is not simply social prejudice but structural design: FPTP's high-stakes constituency races make parties risk-averse in ways that entrench existing inequalities.

Regional Imbalances and Legislative Skew

Another structural issue highlighted by the Bihar results is the spatial imbalance produced by FPTP. Parties strong in specific regional clusters gain disproportionately high representation, while those with widely dispersed but significant support fare poorly. This creates uneven political power within the state, influencing the distribution of development resources, ministerial allocations, and policy priorities. Bihar's electoral map thus becomes not simply a reflection of democratic choice but of geographic distortions built into the system itself.

The Road Ahead: Rethinking Electoral Design

The Bihar verdict has intensified calls for re-evaluating whether FPTP remains adequate for a complex, multiparty democracy. Several democracies with similar social heterogeneity such as Germany, New Zealand, and South Africa have adopted proportional or mixed electoral systems to ensure fairer representation. A mixed-member system, combining constituency-based elections with proportional representation, may offer India a more balanced model. Others advocate ranked choice voting to ensure that candidates secure majority support in their constituencies. The larger issue is whether India's democracy can continue to rely on a system that consistently misaligns legislative power with popular vote share. The Bihar elections offer a sobering reminder that electoral legitimacy requires more than procedural correctness; it demands representational fairness.

The 2025 Bihar election underscores a fundamental truth: India's First Past the Post system, designed for a simpler political era, struggles to reflect the complexity of contemporary electoral preferences. The distortions in vote-to-seat conversion, the rise of manufactured majorities, the suppression of smaller parties, the reinforcement of social hierarchies, and the skewing of regional representation all point toward an urgent need for systemic reflection. As democratic expectations evolve and political competition deepens, India must confront the question of whether its electoral system continues to serve the constitutional promise of a truly representative democracy.

Author is Assistant Professor, School of Law, UPES (Dehradun)

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