Conceptualizing Political Dominance in India: A Multidimensional Framework

Abstract

This study seeks to conceptualize the phenomenon of political dominance within a competitive party system, advancing a multidimensional analytical framework rooted in Indian experience. Existing literature on party system developed by scholars like Maurice Duverger and Giovanni Sartori, primarily conceptualises dominant party systems in terms of electoral superiority. Even though Duverger has already pointed towards the sociological element of dominance too, but this insight remains underdeveloped and insufficiently integrated with the general analytical framework, rendering the existing approaches inadequate to explain dominance in socially heterogeneous and postcolonial democracies. The study carefully examines evolution of the Indian party system from the period of Congress dominance to the contemporary dominance of the Bharatiya Janata Party and argues that political dominance extends beyond mere electoral success. Therefore, to understand dominance in a holistic manner, a four-dimensional framework is proposed which comprises of electoral pre-eminence, ideological hegemony, organizational depth, and discursive control as the key variables. The study employs comparative historical analysis to understand how dominant party affects political competition, structure the behaviour of opposition forces and define the normative boundaries for the democratic discourse. It finally indicates that dominance is a relational and dynamic process that is maintained by an active interplay between institutional, sociological, and strategic variables instead of mere recurring electoral wins. By offering a theoretically refined and empirically grounded model, the paper contributes to the comparative study of party systems and provides a framework applicable to other democracies in the Global South.