The Congress vote share of 39.1% in Haryana is its best in the state’s assembly elections since 2005, when it won 42.5% of the total votes with a massive three-fourth majority in terms of seats. In fact, the Congress’s vote share in 2024 is also better than the vote share of the BJP in the 2014 and 2019 assembly elections, when the BJP won 47 and 40 assembly constituencies (ACs) much more than the 37 the Congress has won this time.
So why did the Congress fall behind the BJP in terms of seats despite winning an almost similar number of votes? The general answer is the Congress did not realise that Haryana’s electoral game has changed compared to when it dominated the state’s politics under the Hoodas in 2005 and 2009. The statistical answer is its votes were distributed more thinly across the state than BJP’s. Here is how.
One way to check if a party’s state-level vote share is strategically distributed for winning seats is by looking at the seat share to vote share ratio. This number represents a party’s ability to convert votes to seats in a first-past-the-post system. If this number is low, it means that the party’s votes are not strategically located for maximising its seat share. For the Congress, this number is 1.05 in this election, the sixth lowest among the 14 assembly elections in the state and significantly lower than what it was in 2005 and 2009. To be sure, in the five elections when this number was lower than in 2024 (1977, 1987, 1996, 2000, and 2014), the highest vote share the Congress posted was only 31.2% (in 2000). This means that in other elections when the party’s vote to seat conversion was poor, it also did not have popular support. This is the first time that the party has a poor vote-to-seat conversion despite having close to 40% vote share at the state level.
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Having popular support distributed thinly across the state hurt the Congress because this was a more bipolar election at the state level than in recent times. One way to look at this is through the median (the middle value in a distribution) of the Effective Number of Parties (ENOP) in the 90 ACs of the state. ENOP is the reciprocal of the sum of squares of the vote share of all parties in an AC. A lower ENOP means the contest is more bipolar. For example, if three parties win vote share of 60%, 40%, and 0% in an AC, the ENOP for that AC will be 1.92. This number will increase to 2.7 if the vote shares change to 50%, 25%, and 25%. The ENOP for the 2024 assembly election in Haryana is 2.47, which is the lowest since 1987, when this number was 2.44. This means that the contest in Haryana at the AC-level was the most bipolar after 1987.
{{/usCountry}}Having popular support distributed thinly across the state hurt the Congress because this was a more bipolar election at the state level than in recent times. One way to look at this is through the median (the middle value in a distribution) of the Effective Number of Parties (ENOP) in the 90 ACs of the state. ENOP is the reciprocal of the sum of squares of the vote share of all parties in an AC. A lower ENOP means the contest is more bipolar. For example, if three parties win vote share of 60%, 40%, and 0% in an AC, the ENOP for that AC will be 1.92. This number will increase to 2.7 if the vote shares change to 50%, 25%, and 25%. The ENOP for the 2024 assembly election in Haryana is 2.47, which is the lowest since 1987, when this number was 2.44. This means that the contest in Haryana at the AC-level was the most bipolar after 1987.
{{/usCountry}}A more bipolar contest implies less fragmentation of votes. This also means that the vote share threshold for winning an AC is inches higher. This is also what has happened in Haryana in 2024. The median vote share for winning parties across ACs in this election is 48.9%, which is also the highest since 1987, when this number was 53.5%. On the other hand, the Congress median vote share is 40.2%, much behind what was needed for winning an AC in this election. The median vote share of the BJP is 44.6%, which is the highest for the single-largest party in the state since 2000.