Edges of the Nation: Party System Divergence and Political Representation in Mountain India

India is a well-known exception to Duverger’s Law, which states that single-member plurality electoral systems typically lead to a two-party dominance, due to strong regional parties. We hypothesize that this India-level phenomenon is overly dominated by electoral data from densely populated regions like the Indo-Gangetic plains. Drawing on anthropological and historical scholarship, we postulate that mountain societies behave differently. To test our hypothesis, we perform a quantitative analysis on electoral data comparing India’s Himalayan states to those in the Gangetic and Brahmaputra plains. The results indicate that the plains are diverging while the mountain states are converging towards Duverger’s two-party equilibrium. This suggests that India’s mountain and plains states have a structural dissimilarity in their political culture, which supports the anthropological and historical literature from which we started. We hope to add both to the literature on electoral studies and to mountain societies and regional studies.