INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PROFESSIONAL STUDIES

Himachal Pradesh's government has changed hands at every Assembly election from 1990 to 2022, a regularity known locally as the riwaz. This paper asks a quantitative question that its companion studies do not: given that the direction of alternation is nearly constant, how stable is the mechanism that converts votes into seats, and how does a modest vote movement become Himachal's characteristically large seat swings? Using a nine-election state series (1985–2022) compiled from Election Commission of India returns and constituency-level margin panels for 1998–2022, we compute an INC seat-vote elasticity (swing ratio) for each of the eight election-to-election cycles. Measured against INC's raw vote share, the elasticity ranges from 3.8 (1985–1990) to 20.1 (2012–2017), includes one negative value (−7.0, 1998–2003), and stands at 12.7 for 2017–2022. A robustness check using INC's share of the two-party (INC + BJP) vote shows that most of this dispersion reflects vote flows between BJP and third parties rather than instability in seat conversion: the 1998–2003 sign reversal disappears, seven of the eight cycles fall between 3.4 and 6.5, and a pooled estimate across all eight cycles is 4.64 (SE 0.39; R² = 0.96), significantly above the cube-law benchmark of 3. A disaggregated Pedersen index, computable for three cycles, shows that the conventional three-category approximation understates volatility by between 0 and 1.5 points. At the constituency level, a seat's 2017 margin does not predict its 2022 margin (r = 0.138, p = 0.261), and seats that changed hands in 2022 were won as comfortably as seats that were retained (t = 0.457, p = 0.649). Extending the persistence test to three earlier pairs gives a mixed picture: weak positive persistence on the pre-2008 delimitation (1998→2003: r = 0.245, p = 0.044; 2003→2007: r = 0.260, p = 0.032), which does not survive correction for multiple comparisons, and none on the current delimitation (2012→2017: r = 0.056, p = 0.651). We conclude that Himachal's alternation is sustained by a closely balanced two-party contest in which a stable and unusually high swing ratio converts small net vote movements into decisive seat changes, while the identity of the marginal seats reshuffles from one election to the next.

Keywords: Himachal Pradesh; electoral volatility; seat-vote elasticity; swing ratio; cube law; Pedersen index; anti-incumbency; constituency competitiveness; delimitation; riwaz