The Philosophy of the Constitution Notes | Class 11 Political Science

13 September 2022 · 11 min read

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These standardised notes cover the Class 11 Political Science chapter on Election and Representation, one of the most practical parts of the Indian Constitution at work. The chapter explains how democracy actually runs in India: the types of elections, the methods used at different levels, and the difference between the First Past the Post system and the Proportional Representation system. It also introduces the key institutions that keep elections fair, such as the Election Commission of India and the Delimitation Commission, and it ends with the debate on electoral reforms.

Introduction

India is a constitutional democracy with a parliamentary system of government, and at the heart of the system is a commitment to hold regular, free and fair elections.

These elections decide the composition of the government, the membership of the two houses of parliament, the state and union territory legislative assemblies, and the offices of the President and Vice President.

Elections in India involve political mobilisation and organisational effort on an astonishing scale.

What is First Past the Post?

First Past the Post is an electoral system that is also known as the simple majority system. In this system the candidate with the highest number of votes is the winner. India follows this system for the direct election of the Lok Sabha and the State Legislative Assemblies.

Under First Past the Post the country is divided into constituencies, and the key features are:

Each constituency elects one representative.
The candidate who secures the highest number of votes in that constituency is declared elected.
Whoever has more votes than every other candidate is declared elected.
The winning candidate need not secure a majority of the total votes cast, only the largest share.
For this reason the method is also called the Plurality System.

What is Proportional Representation?

In the Proportional Representation system a party wins the same proportion of seats as its proportion of votes. Each party fills its quota of seats by choosing nominees from a preference list that is declared before the elections.

What type of election system is followed in India?

India mainly uses First Past the Post, but it has also adopted the Proportional Representation system on a limited scale for some indirect elections. The Constitution prescribes a complex variation of the Proportional Representation system for the election of the President and the Vice President, and for elections to the Rajya Sabha and the Vidhan Parishads (Legislative Councils).

Comparison of the FPTP and PR Systems

First Past the Post (FPTP)

The country is divided into small geographical units called constituencies. Every constituency elects one representative.
The voter votes for a candidate.
A party may win more seats than its share of votes in the legislature.
A candidate who wins the election may not have won a majority of votes. Examples: the United Kingdom and India.

Proportional Representation (PR)

Large geographical areas are marked out as constituencies, and the entire country may even be a single constituency. More than one representative may be elected from one constituency.
The voter votes for a party, and every party gets seats in the legislature in proportion to the percentage of votes it receives.
Examples: Israel and the Netherlands.

What are the advantages of the FPTP system?

The popularity and success of the First Past the Post system come mainly from its simplicity.

The system is easy to understand even for voters who have no specialised knowledge of politics and elections.
A clear choice is presented to voters. They simply endorse a candidate or a party while voting.
Depending on the nature of the actual contest, voters may give greater importance to the party, or to the candidate, or balance the two.
The system offers a choice not just between parties but between specific candidates.
In a constituency based system the voters know exactly who their own representative is and can hold that person accountable.

Why is FPTP believed to suit a stable government better than PR?

Many experts argue that a Proportional Representation system may not be suitable for building a stable government in a parliamentary system.

For a parliamentary system to work, the executive must have a majority in the legislature. When seats are shared strictly by vote share, a clear single party majority becomes unlikely.
In a very diverse country like India, a PR system could encourage each community to form its own party.
First Past the Post usually gives the largest party or coalition more seats than its vote share alone would suggest, which helps a stable government to form and function smoothly.
To win a local seat, the system encourages voters from different social groups to come together.
It has proved simple and familiar to ordinary voters.

According to the Constitution, some seats in the Lok Sabha and the State Legislative Assemblies are reserved for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes. In a reserved seat, candidates must belong to that community, but all voters in the constituency are allowed to vote. This reservation was originally set for a fixed period and has been extended by later constitutional amendments, and Parliament can decide to extend it again.

Delimitation Commission

Who decides which constituency is reserved, and on what basis?

The Delimitation Commission, an independent body, decides the reservation of constituencies. The President of India appoints the Delimitation Commission, which works together with the Election Commission of India.

The number of seats reserved in each state depends on the proportion of Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe residents in that state. After drawing the boundaries, the Delimitation Commission examines the population composition of each constituency.

Seats for the Scheduled Tribes are reserved in constituencies with the highest proportion of Scheduled Tribe population.
For the Scheduled Castes, the Commission selects constituencies with a higher proportion of Scheduled Caste people but spreads these constituencies across the state, because the Scheduled Caste population is fairly evenly distributed.

How many times has the boundary been redrawn?

The Delimitation Commission has been set up four times, in 1952, 1963, 1973 and 2002, under the Delimitation Acts of 1950, 1962, 1972 and 2002.

42nd Amendment, 1976: the number of seats was to remain unchanged till the year 2000.
84th Amendment, 2001: the number and state wise distribution of seats was frozen till 2026.

Universal Franchise and the Right to Contest

Who can vote, and who can contest elections?

Universal Adult Franchise gives the right to vote to all adult citizens, regardless of wealth, income, gender, social status, race or ethnicity, subject only to a few minor exceptions.

Earlier the voting age was 21. In 1989 it was lowered to 18 through the 61st Amendment. This is known as Universal Adult Franchise, and it means that all adult citizens can take part in choosing their representatives. It is consistent with the principle of equality and non discrimination.

Right to contest elections

All citizens have the right to stand for election and become a representative of the people.
There are minimum age requirements. To stand for a Lok Sabha or Assembly election, a candidate must be at least 25 years old.
A person who has been imprisoned for two or more years for an offence is disqualified from contesting elections.
There are no restrictions of income, education, class or gender on the right to contest.

Election Commission of India

What is the Election Commission of India?

The Election Commission of India is an autonomous constitutional authority responsible for administering Union and State election processes in India. It conducts elections to the Lok Sabha, the Rajya Sabha and the State Legislative Assemblies, as well as the elections for the offices of the President and the Vice President.

Articles 324 to 329 of the Constitution deal with the power, functions, tenure and eligibility of the Commission and its members. A Chief Electoral Officer is appointed in every state to assist the work of the Election Commission. The Commission is not responsible for the elections of local bodies.

The Election Commission can be a single member or a multi member body. It was a single member body till 1989, when two more Election Commissioners were appointed just before the 1989 elections. In 1993 it became a multi member body, and it has remained so.

Multi member commission

A multi member Election Commission is seen as more appropriate because power is shared and there is greater accountability.

The Chief Election Commissioner presides over the Commission but does not have more powers than the other Election Commissioners. The Chief Election Commissioner and the two Election Commissioners have equal powers, and they take decisions as a collective body.
They are appointed by the President of India on the advice of the Council of Ministers.
They are appointed for a term of six years, or until the age of 65, whichever is earlier.
The Chief Election Commissioner can be removed before the end of the term only if both Houses of Parliament recommend it with a special majority. This protects the Commission, so that a ruling party cannot remove a Chief Election Commissioner who refuses to favour it.

What are the functions of the Election Commission of India?

The Election Commission has a wide range of functions:

It supervises the regular updating of the voters list and keeps it free of errors, such as missing names of genuine voters or the names of people who are not eligible.
It decides the timing of elections and prepares the full election schedule, from the notification and the filing of nominations to scrutiny, withdrawal, polling, counting and the declaration of results.
It can postpone or cancel an election in the whole country, a state or a single constituency if it believes the atmosphere is not fair.
It sets a Model Code of Conduct that political parties and candidates must follow.
It can order a re poll or a recount in a constituency when it believes the process was not fully fair.
It grants recognition to political parties and allots an election symbol to each of them.

Electoral Reforms

Elections are a central part of Indian politics, since India is one of the world's largest democracies. Electoral reforms play a critical role in keeping elections free and fair, and they should be reviewed regularly. Some of the reforms that experts often suggest are:

Changing our system from First Past the Post to a variant of Proportional Representation, so that parties get seats closer to their share of votes.
Making sure that at least one third of the seats in Parliament and the assemblies are held by women.
Regulating the role of money in elections more strictly, for example by paying election expenses from a separate government fund.
Barring candidates charged with serious crimes from contesting, even while an appeal is pending in court.
Prohibiting appeals to caste and religion in campaigns.
Passing a law to make the working of political parties more transparent and democratic.

Why it still matters

This chapter is not just exam theory. The rules in these notes are being tested in real Indian politics right now, and three live stories show why they matter.

First, First Past the Post decides who governs India. The 2024 Lok Sabha election was the largest election ever held anywhere. The Election Commission of India put about 96.9 crore people on the voters list, the biggest electorate in the world, and about 64.2 crore of them voted, a turnout of roughly 66 per cent. Notice how First Past the Post works in practice: the BJP won 240 seats on its own, short of the 272 needed for a majority, yet the National Democratic Alliance together took 293 of the 543 seats and formed the government. That is exactly the point made above, that a party or coalition can win power without a single party winning half the votes.

Second, the 2026 delimitation freeze in your notes is now a national debate. The notes mention that the 84th Amendment froze the number of seats till 2026, based on the 1971 Census. That freeze is now expiring, and the question of redrawing seats has become one of the most argued topics in the country. Southern states such as Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka worry that if seats are shared out strictly by population, states that slowed their population growth could lose influence in Parliament, while faster growing states gain seats. A Delimitation Bill and a linked amendment that proposed raising the maximum strength of the Lok Sabha to 850 seats were debated but did not pass. This is the Delimitation Commission section coming alive in real time.

Third, the reform demanding one third seats for women is now law. The electoral reforms section above asks that at least one third of the legislature be made up of women. That reform has become the Constitution (106th Amendment) Act, 2023, also called the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam. It reserves one third of the seats in the Lok Sabha and the state assemblies for women. It was formally brought into force in 2026, but it will only take full effect after a fresh Census and a delimitation exercise, which ties it directly to the same 2026 delimitation story above.

If you want to see how elections connect to economics, geography and civics as one big picture, explore the topic on the Learnacy Hub. You can also revise the rest of these Class 11 Political Science notes, or browse more standardised study material in our study resources.

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