Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

India doesn’t have Left-Right divide in Lok Sabha. MP concerns are tied to geography

The US Congress sorts itself into two near-perfectly separated clusters. Democrats on one side, Republicans on the other. Data shows that's not the case in India.

When you map Indian MPs on a political vocabulary space, leaders from BJP and Congress end up in almost the same place. It shows the real dividing line in the Lok Sabha is not party; it is geography.

In 1985, two American political scientists named Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal did something that changed how we think about legislatures. They took decades of congressional roll call votes, ran a matrix factorisation (a technique for finding hidden patterns in a large table of numbers) on them, and produced a single number for every senator and representative: their “ideal point” on a Left-Right scale. The result, published as the NOMINATE model and refined over the following decades, showed that the US Congress sorts itself into two near-perfectly separated clusters. Democrats on one side, Republicans on the other, with almost no overlap. The party predicts legislative behaviour with striking accuracy.

The question I wanted to answer was whether the same is true of India’s Lok Sabha.

The answer, based on data from 1,50,000 starred questions filed across the 16th, 17th, and 18th Lok Sabhas, is no.

The reason reveals something important about how Indian parliamentary democracy works.

Also read: The math behind India’s elections—Why proximity matters

What ideal points measure

A “starred question” is one of the most direct forms of parliamentary accountability available to an Indian MP. It is a formal, numbered question that a minister must answer in the chamber, on the record. Unlike unstarred questions answered in writing, starred questions can generate supplementary exchanges on the floor. They are, in effect, the vocabulary of parliamentary scrutiny.

The method I used mirrors NOMINATE but substitutes vocabulary for votes. We turn each MP into a list of the words they use most distinctively in their questions, then use a standard statistical method to reduce those thousands of words to the two underlying patterns that best separate one MP from another. In the US model, Dimension 1 almost always captures the liberal-conservative axis. I wanted to see what it captures in India.

The answer: Not party.

Also read: 2026 election results show power is rarely defeated by rivals. Credibility matters more

The BJP-Congress overlap

After running the SVD (the pattern-finding method just described) on a matrix of 860 MPs and 5,713 vocabulary terms (filtered for minimum usage and stop words), the first dimension explains 63.5 per cent of the variation captured across the top three components. The second explains 19.4 per cent.

On Dimension 1, the BJP centroid centroid (a centroid is the average position of a........

© ThePrint