Politics of Representation and Participation

Political Parties (Comparative)

Political participation, the involvement of citizens in political life, necessitates organised channels through which people can express demands and influence public policy. Political parties perform this crucial role by linking society with the state. Parties convert scattered social interests into political programmes, mobilise voters, recruit leadership and provide choices during elections; they are, in the language of comparative politics, the great intermediaries between the social basis and the governmental structure of a political order.

A party system refers to the pattern of interaction among political parties within a political order. It shows whether politics is dominated by one party, two major parties, or many parties, and it also reflects deeper social divisions such as class, caste, religion, ethnicity, region and ideology. The study of the party system helps us understand how participation is organised, how representation is structured, and how power is gained, shared and contested in a political system.

Edmund Burke's approach to political parties was normative, concerned with what ought to be, and he defended parties as morally legitimate and necessary institutions in a constitutional system. For Burke, a political party was a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed. This definition is important because Burke did not see the party as a selfish faction: a faction works for private interest, personal ambition or narrow group benefit, whereas a party is based on a shared public principle and aims at the national interest. Burke argued that parties are essential for responsible government. Individual politicians may be weak, isolated or opportunistic, but when they come together around common principles they can provide stable leadership and consistent policy; parties also help in organising public opinion and giving direction to representative government. His view was connected to his defence of representative democracy: representatives should not simply act as delegates of the voters but should use their judgment for the larger good of the nation, and parties should not blindly follow popular passions but should guide public opinion through reason, experience and constitutional responsibility. Thus Burke gave one of the earliest justifications of political parties; before him, parties were often seen as dangerous factions that divided society.

Otto Kirchheimer gave the idea of catch-all parties to explain the changing nature of political parties in modern democracies. A catch-all party tries to attract voters from all sections of society instead of representing only one class, religion or ideology, its main aim being to win elections by widening its social base. Earlier, many parties were mass parties, having a large organised membership among the masses and closely linked to a particular social group such as workers, peasants, religious communities or the middle class; the mass party had a strong ideology, committed members and deep organisational links with society. Kirchheimer argued that this type of party is declining in advanced industrial societies, and that parties are becoming more flexible, less ideological and more election-oriented. In a catch-all party, ideology becomes weaker; the party does not present itself as the voice of one class or group, tries to appear as a national party speaking for everyone, reduces extreme positions and adopts moderate policies to attract the maximum number of voters. In such a setup, leadership, media image, funding and policy packaging become more important than cadre, ideology and membership. Kirchheimer argued that this change happened because of social and economic transformation: class divisions became less rigid, welfare policies reduced some class tensions, and mass media created new ways of reaching voters directly, so that parties no longer depended only on permanent members or loyal social groups and started targeting floating voters and middle-ground opinion. The catch-all party, however, has serious weaknesses: it weakens ideology and turns politics into marketing; parties may become dependent on powerful leaders, media managers or big donors; and representation can suffer since specific class or group interests may be ignored in the search for broad electoral appeal. Thus Kirchheimer showed that modern parties were moving from representation to vote maximisation, becoming less like movements and more like election machines, an idea that remains highly relevant today across the world.

Lenin gave the theory of the communist party in his pamphlet What Is to Be Done?, whereas Marx, though he and Engels wrote the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), never developed a theory of a vanguard party standing above the workers. Lenin believed that workers are not capable of developing revolutionary consciousness on their own, and hence the communist party will act as the vanguard of the revolution. He made a clear distinction between the communist party and trade unions: trade unions are parts of the bourgeois system and can secure only concessions for workers, whereas the communist party can bring workers to power. The communist party works on the principle of democratic centralism: people communicate to the top leadership what they want, the top leadership converts people's demands into a workable programme of action, and once a decision is taken by the top leadership it is implemented at all levels, hence the centralisation. Behavioural scholars, by contrast, focus on the pragmatic aspects of political parties, viewing them as instruments for gaining and exercising power.

Robert Michels, in his seminal work Political Parties (1911), proposed the iron law of oligarchy. He analysed the internal functioning of socialist parties in Germany to examine the claim of Marxists that socialist parties operate on different principles, and he came to the conclusion that there is no difference in their internal functioning: all powers are in the hands of the top leadership. Hence he suggested that oligarchy is the iron law: power will always be in the hands of elites, and the masses never shape decisions. Thus, irrespective of ideology, all parties operate in a similar fashion.

Maurice Duverger has given the Duverger law, which tells us the relationship between the electoral system and the party system. If a country has a simple majoritarian type of electoral system, it will have a two-party system; if a country has proportional representation, it will have a multi-party system. India, however, is an exception to the Duverger law, since a multi-party system exists with a simple majoritarian electoral system. Duverger also gave a structural analysis of political parties: on the basis of organisation, membership and finance there are two types of parties, the cadre party and the mass party, and he identified four types of internal party structures, including the caucus, the branch, the cell and the militia, each associated with a particular type of party organisation.

Giovanni Sartori emphasised that the nature of a party system is determined not merely by the number of parties but by the number of parties with systemic relevance, that is, those capable of influencing government formation and policy. He distinguished between parties that merely exist and parties that matter, and his criterion of relevance is what separates the effective party system from the merely descriptive counting of parties. In established Western democracies, political parties are typically institutionalised and operate within a framework of internal democracy, transparency and financial accountability; they often have clear ideological foundations and are less dependent on individual leaders, which ensures continuity beyond personal leadership changes. In many developing or non-Western countries, by contrast, political parties often exhibit a blend of modern organisational structures and traditional practices: parties combine formal constitutions and election machinery with personalist leadership, kinship networks, caste and communal loyalties, and the distinction between party, movement and faction is frequently blurred.

Clientelism

Clientelism is the exchange of material benefits for political support through personal and unequal relationships between patrons and clients. A patron with access to resources, such as jobs, loans, licences, welfare benefits or protection, provides them selectively, and the clients repay with votes, attendance at rallies and loyalty. James C. Scott ('Patron-Client Politics and Political Change in Southeast Asia', 1972) defined the patron-client tie as a largely instrumental friendship between people of unequal status, and anthropological studies of Southern Italy, Latin America and South Asia showed how such ties link villages to the state.

• Features: the relationship is personal, unequal, reciprocal and contingent, since benefits depend on political support rather than on rights.
• Patronage and clientelism: patronage usually refers to the use of public office and public resources, especially jobs, to reward supporters. Clientelism is the wider system of exchange, which may also run through private resources, local notables and party machines such as Tammany Hall in nineteenth-century New York.
• Brokers: in mass democracies patrons cannot know every voter, so they rely on intermediaries. Susan Stokes, Thad Dunning, Marcelo Nazareno and Valeria Brusco, in Brokers, Voters, and Clientelism (2013), show how local brokers in Argentina and elsewhere monitor voters and channel benefits, and how they may serve their own interests rather than the party's.
• Programmatic versus clientelistic linkage: Herbert Kitschelt and Steven Wilkinson, in Patrons, Clients, and Policies (2007), distinguish parties that win votes through policies benefiting whole categories of citizens from parties that win them through targeted and contingent exchange.

India offers rich material. M.N. Srinivas used the term 'vote bank' in the 1950s for the bloc support that village leaders could deliver. Kanchan Chandra, in Why Ethnic Parties Succeed (2004), calls India a patronage-democracy, a democracy in which the state controls a large share of jobs and services and elected officials have discretion in distributing them, so that voters favour parties led by members of their own ethnic group in the expectation of benefits. Tariq Thachil's Elite Parties, Poor Voters (2014) shows how service provision by the BJP's Sangh affiliates helped it win poor voters, and Partha Chatterjee's The Politics of the Governed (2004) reads the bargaining of the urban poor with politicians as 'political society', in which welfare is negotiated rather than claimed as a right. In S. Subramaniam Balaji v. State of Tamil Nadu (2013) the Supreme Court held that manifesto promises of free goods are not a corrupt practice under the Representation of the People Act 1951 and asked the Election Commission to frame guidelines. The shift to Direct Benefit Transfer through the JAM trinity of Jan Dhan accounts, Aadhaar and mobile phones has reduced the role of local brokers, though some observers argue that it binds beneficiaries directly to the national leader instead.

Clientelism is usually criticised for weakening programmatic parties, tilting public spending towards targeted goods, breeding corruption and undermining the secret ballot and accountability. Yet scholars also note that in poor societies with weak bureaucracies it gives marginal groups access to an otherwise distant state. Clientelism tends to decline as incomes rise, the civil service becomes impartial and welfare becomes rule-based, which is why it is more marked in developing than in advanced industrial democracies.

Setbacks for the Centre-Left and the Rise of the Right

Since the mid-2010s, and especially in the elections of 2024 and 2025, centrist and centre-left parties have lost ground in many democracies while parties of the right have gained. The trend is real but uneven, and much of the gain has gone to the radical or populist right rather than to the traditional centre-right.

• Europe: in the European Parliament election of June 2024 the centre-right European People's Party remained the largest group with 188 of 720 seats, while the liberal Renew Europe group and the Greens lost heavily and groups further to the right gained. In Germany's election of February 2025 the CDU/CSU came first with 28.5 per cent and Friedrich Merz became Chancellor, the AfD came second with 20.8 per cent, and the SPD fell to 16.4 per cent, its worst result since 1887. In Portugal the centre-right Democratic Alliance won in 2024 and again in May 2025, when the Socialists fell to third place behind Chega for the first time.
• The Americas: Javier Milei won Argentina's presidency in 2023, Donald Trump won the US presidency again in 2024, and in Chile José Antonio Kast of the Republican Party defeated Jeannette Jara, the candidate of the governing left, in the December 2025 run-off.
• Counter-examples: the trend is not universal. Labour won a landslide in Britain in July 2024, the Labor Party increased its majority in Australia in May 2025, and Mark Carney's Liberals won Canada's election in April 2025.
• India: India does not fit the Western pattern neatly. The BJP, a party of the right, has dominated national politics since 2014, but in 2024 it won 240 of 543 seats and now governs through the NDA coalition.

Several explanations are offered:

• Economic discontent: post-pandemic inflation and the cost-of-living crisis turned voters against incumbents of every colour in 2024, and centre-left governments were often the incumbents.
• The changing social base of the left: Thomas Piketty has described a shift from class-based voting to a 'Brahmin left' of educated voters and a 'merchant right' of the wealthy, leaving many working-class voters without a political home. The collapse of PASOK in Greece after the debt crisis gave the name 'Pasokification' to the decline of social democratic parties.
• Cultural backlash: Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, in Cultural Backlash (2019), argue that older and less educated voters are reacting against rapid cultural change, and immigration has become a leading concern for many voters.
• Strategic convergence: centre-right parties have adopted tougher positions on migration, crime and national identity, while centre-left parties that accepted market reforms in the 1990s, the 'Third Way' of Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder, find it hard to offer a distinct economic alternative.

The trend poses a challenge for representation. When the mainstream parties of the centre lose support, party systems fragment, coalition-building becomes harder and the boundary between the mainstream right and the radical right weakens. Yet the counter-examples show that the centre-left can still win when it presents itself as the party of competent change.

Pressure Groups

Pressure groups are known as the anonymous empire, a term given by Samuel Finer in Anonymous Empire (1958). This shows the basic difference between political parties and pressure groups: political parties contest for acquiring formal posts in governmental institutions, whereas pressure groups do not compete for formal posts yet they influence the government's decision making to a significant extent. It can be said that pressure groups play the game of hide and seek in the political system: if political parties perform the role of interest aggregation, pressure groups do interest articulation. They are considered an integral component of pluralist democracies, and every democracy recognises the freedom to form associations.

The study of pressure groups has been one of the major concerns of political sociologists, as these groups operate at the interface of politics and society. The study of pressure groups is known as pluralism, and the pluralist theory of democracy places great importance on the study of pressure groups. Robert Dahl, on the basis of the role of pressure groups in liberal democracies, preferred to call these democracies polyarchies. Behavioural political scholars wanted to develop standard terminology in political science, as exists in the natural sciences. When we use the term pressure group, we are focusing on the technique employed by these groups, namely lobbying for the promotion of their interests; whereas when we use the term interest group, we are emphasising the purpose, namely interest articulation. The term interest group is more appropriate because pressure is a technique that can be employed by the opposition, social movements and others, and hence the term pressure group may create ambiguity.

Almond classified pressure groups into four types. The first are institutional interest groups, which are part of governmental institutions or whose members are part of governmental institutions, such as organisations of civil servants, military personnel and government sector banks. They are the most powerful pressure groups because they operate within the system and are in the best possible position to influence government policies. Institutional pressure groups are more prominent in developing countries, considering that the states in developing countries are overdeveloped states; in Western countries they may not be as powerful, because Western countries normally have minimal states. However, the difference is only in theory; in reality the situation may vary. The Army in Pakistan is the strongest pressure group, and it is for this reason that the Army is called the deep state; though the USA is a democracy, its politics gives a prominent role to the military and industries, and C. Wright Mills held that the USA is ruled by power elites.

The second type are associational interest groups. An association denotes an organisation which is purely based on interest: people come together for a particular interest irrespective of caste, colour, nationality, ethnicity or any other ascriptive criterion, as in Amnesty International, Greenpeace, FICCI, the Bharatiya Kisan Union and SEWA. Such pressure groups are more prominent in Western countries; however, in developing countries, too, the trend is changing since the 1990s because of the beginning of globalisation, with a proliferation of these organisations in number and an increase in the scope of their impact. The third type are non-associational interest groups, which are based on identity, such as caste, community, religion, language and race, for example the Jat Mahasabha, the Kshatriya Mahasabha and the Gujjar Sabha. They are exclusive in nature, and membership is based on ascriptive criteria, that is, on birth. Non-associational pressure groups play a greater role in prismatic societies. The fourth type are anomic interest groups. Anomic means normlessness: pressure groups are a collective activity, and there are some sorts of collective behaviours which cannot be placed under institutional, associational or non-associational categories, and these are categorised as anomic pressure groups. Normally the term is used for crowd behaviour or some short-term association, for example people protesting against a road accident. They are more visible in developing countries because of the lack of institutionalisation of democracy.

Almond's model is static; it does not tell how pressure group politics evolves over a period of time, and hence Jean Blondel proposed a more dynamic model. Blondel classifies interest groups on the basis of the factors influencing their formation, dividing them into two primary categories, community interest groups and associational groups, each with two subcategories. Community interest groups typically aim to promote the interests of their community and may exert pressure on the government for protection or assistance. They emerge from shared social relationships and communal life, often forming organically within communities, and they are generally informal, though some may have formal structures. Their subcategories are customary groups, which are rooted in long-standing customs and traditions and whose formation is based on inherited social structures such as caste or ethnic affiliations - in India, caste and sub-caste groups exemplify customary groups - and institutional groups, which consist of individuals who have lived together for extended periods and developed common social relationships, for example welfare associations of serving or retired soldiers, civil servants' welfare associations and senior citizens' welfare bodies.

Associational groups in Blondel's scheme are formed through deliberate association, typically organised around specific interests or objectives; they are usually formally structured and aim to influence public policy or protect the interests of their members. Their subcategories are protective groups and promotional groups. Protective groups seek to safeguard the interests of their members, often representing a homogeneous clientele; examples include trade unions, professional associations and associations of traders. These groups tend to have substantial influence over policy-making processes: as Robert Salisbury observed in the context of British groups, protective groups possess substantial influence over policy, whereas promotional groups, even with large followings, often have only a minor impact on public decisions. Promotional groups, by contrast, aim to advance broader causes that may benefit large segments of society; their membership often spans diverse sections of the community, and examples include environmental organisations and groups advocating disarmament. While these groups may mobilise significant public support, they generally exert less influence on policy-making compared to protective groups, and they may face challenges in adapting their goals in response to changing political situations.

Pressure group politics is most influential in the USA. Pressure groups are not very powerful in countries where political parties represent a specific ideology, for example Britain, where the Labour Party is assumed to work in the interest of the working class. Pressure groups in India have also not played an effective role historically, although since the 1990s there has been a growth of pressure group politics in India. One of the earliest studies on pressure group politics in India was done by Rajni Kothari. According to Kothari, pressure groups have been agents of modernisation and reservoirs of leadership; in India, communal pressure groups have been more dominant, yet pressure groups did not enjoy much legitimacy in the eyes of the people. The predominant status of the Congress party did not allow pressure groups to gain primacy - in fact, the status of other political parties was like that of pressure groups - and hence Kothari called them parties of pressure. Rudolph and Rudolph have analysed the role of caste associations, and Myron Weiner, in his book The Politics of Scarcity (1962), has highlighted the role of communal pressure groups. According to Professor Anand Chakravarty, the Government of India should have shown greater accommodation towards pressure groups, as many pressure groups were banned under the UAPA; had the government accommodated them, it would have been easier to address the alienation and secessionist trends.

Since the 1990s, pressure group politics in India has been shifting from state-dominated pluralism to more powerful pressure group politics. Pressure groups started gaining legitimacy as a result of liberalisation and globalisation, and the Government of India has incorporated different interest groups into policy-making institutions, such as the NAC, the NSAB and now the NITI Aayog. Communal pressure groups, pressure groups of the corporate sector and pressure groups of rich farmers all continue to play a dominant role. India still does not have a dominant women's organisation; environmental lobbies, student unions and trade unions continue to be junior partners of political parties, and many pressure groups, primarily of the left wing, have been banned under the UAPA. The state continues to be the dominant actor in India, and at times it has not been tolerant towards certain pressure groups: recently there was a highly disputed IB report which pointed out that many NGOs are engaged in anti-national propaganda and that their activities have been detrimental to India's growth.

Social Movements

At times, pressure groups, political parties and social movements can transform into one another. The Indian National Congress started as a social movement, changed into a pressure group and then into a political party, and the Aam Aadmi Party started as a social movement and became a political party. Out of the three, social movements are the least institutionalised. Social movements have their own ideology, leadership and life cycle, and a social movement is primarily a feature of left politics: social movements are aligned to the left ideology. In liberal discourse, scholars do not prefer to use the term social movements; they prefer to use the term resource mobilisation.

Modern social movements started in the West as a reaction against the exploitation of the working classes. Workers' movements were the earliest social movements, or left movements, and now these movements are called old social movements. New social movements started in the West in the 1960s and are concerned with developmental issues and quality of life issues, for example environmental movements, human rights movements, civil rights movements and peace movements. Old and new social movements differ on five grounds, objectives, composition, leadership, techniques and ideological orientation. With regard to objectives, old social movements deal with bread and butter issues, whereas new social movements deal with quality of life issues like sustainable development. With regard to composition, old social movements are movements of the lower classes and workers, whereas new social movements are primarily the movements of the middle classes. On leadership, whether old or new, leadership has primarily come from the advanced sections of the middle classes, although this does not mean that lower classes have never provided leadership: Lenin came from the middle class, whereas Mao came from the peasantry. On techniques, old social movements primarily used political techniques, such as force, protests and demonstrations, taking direct action to gain political and economic power; new social movements use multiple mediums like art, literature, theatre, street performance and movies, and their main focus is not on capturing power but on raising consciousness. On ideological orientation, old social movements are materialistic, whereas new social movements are post-materialistic.

In the developing world, considering the prismatic nature of society, old and new social movements are not entirely distinct; they overlap. The Indian environmental movement is a mix of old and new: as an old social movement, it deals with the livelihood concerns of tribals and the poor, and as a new social movement it takes up issues like the protection of the environment.

Contemporary social movements display several new features that distinguish them from the classical movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Black Lives Matter movement, sparked by George Floyd's murder by a police officer in May 2020, reignited global protests against systemic racism and police brutality. Its demands included defunding police departments, investing in Black communities and dismantling systemic racism. BLM operates as a decentralised network, emphasising grassroots activism, and its tactics include mass protests, social media campaigns and community organising. While BLM raised global awareness and led to symbolic changes, such as the removal of Confederate statues, substantial policy reforms have been limited: in the US, police budgets have largely remained unchanged or increased, and systemic racism remains entrenched, necessitating continued anti-racist solidarity.

Fridays for Future, initiated by Greta Thunberg's school strike in 2018, calls for immediate action to combat climate change, adhering to the Paris Agreement targets. Led by youth, FFF organises global climate strikes and leverages social media for mobilisation. Despite such mobilisation, tangible policy changes have been limited, and studies highlight FFF's role in fostering collective identity among youth activists, especially through digital platforms. The Yellow Vests movement, originating in November 2018 in France, began as a protest against fuel tax hikes but quickly expanded to broader issues like economic inequality and perceived governmental neglect. It was a decentralised, grassroots movement without formal leadership, utilising mass demonstrations, road blockades and social media mobilisation. The French government responded by suspending the fuel tax increase and proposing minimum wage hikes, and researchers have noted the movement's unique blend of populist and anti-austerity sentiments.

The Hong Kong protests, triggered by a proposed extradition bill, evolved into a broader pro-democracy movement demanding electoral reforms and police accountability. The movement was largely leaderless and employed mass rallies, sit-ins and online coordination. While the extradition bill was withdrawn, the imposition of the National Security Law in 2020 curtailed many freedoms, leading to arrests and a decline in protests. In India, the farmers' movement arose in response to three agricultural laws perceived to favour corporations; farmers demanded their repeal and legal guarantees for minimum support prices. Led by various farmers' unions, the movement utilised prolonged sit-ins, marches and nationwide strikes, and after a year of sustained protests the Indian government repealed the contentious laws in December 2021.

Following a military coup in February 2021, citizens of Myanmar demanded the restoration of democracy and the release of detained leaders. Known locally as the Spring Revolution, these protests are being led by the National Unity Government and civil society groups, using mass protests, civil disobedience and online campaigns. In response, the military leaders of the coup enacted a number of countermeasures, including internet and social media blackouts, a media blackout, and pursuit of arrests and criminal sentences against protesters. The military's violent crackdown led to ongoing conflict, with parts of the country experiencing armed resistance; thus the movement evolved from peaceful protests to armed resistance.

The Bangladesh student movement was ignited in June 2024 when the High Court Division of the Supreme Court reinstated a controversial quota system, allocating 30% of government jobs to descendants of 1971 Liberation War veterans, a decision which reversed a 2018 reform that had abolished such quotas and sparked widespread discontent among students and job seekers, who viewed the system as discriminatory and a means of political patronage. The demands of the protesters included the abolition of the reinstated quota system in favour of merit-based recruitment, the resignation of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her cabinet, and the implementation of democratic reforms and restoration of civil liberties. The movement was spearheaded by Students Against Discrimination, a coalition of university students from across Bangladesh, which utilised social media platforms like Facebook and Telegram to coordinate nationwide protests, human chains and blockades. The government's initial response was marked by severe repression, with deployment of police and paramilitary forces, use of live ammunition and tear gas; the violence peaked during the July Massacre, with estimates of over 1,500 deaths and thousands injured. On 21 July the Appellate Division cut the quotas to 7 per cent, but the protests went on. Facing mounting pressure, Sheikh Hasina resigned on August 5, 2024 and fled to India, and an interim government was established, led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus, tasked with restoring democracy and organising free elections. Scholars have highlighted the deep-rooted structural issues and the youth's role in challenging authoritarianism, and the movement also underscores the role of social media.

The Gen Z protests in Nepal can be understood as part of the recent wave of youth-led and digitally mobilised social movements, similar to Fridays for Future or the Hong Kong protests; these movements show the growing role of students, social media, leaderless mobilisation and anti-establishment anger in contemporary politics. In Nepal, the immediate trigger was the government's September 2025 ban on several social media platforms, with the state arguing that platforms had failed to register under government rules. For the youth, this looked like an attack on freedom of expression and digital rights, and the anger soon expanded into a larger protest against corruption, nepotism, unemployment and political elites in Nepali politics. The movement was called a Gen Z protest because young students and first-time political participants played a major role, and it used digital tools for mobilisation, including social media and VPNs. This shows a new pattern of political participation where formal party structures are less important and online networks become central; in this sense, the Nepal protests were not only street protests but also a form of digital political mobilisation. The government response worsened the situation: police action against protesters led to deaths and injuries, with police reportedly killing 19 protesters during the September demonstrations, after which the protests escalated and eventually toppled the government. An interim government led by former Chief Justice Sushila Karki was later sworn in with a mandate to conduct fresh elections. The significance of the Nepal Gen Z protests lies in three points: they show a crisis of legitimacy against the background of unemployment and corruption; they show the rise of youth as an independent political force, not always controlled by traditional parties; and they show that attempts to restrict digital space can backfire, because social media has become a major site of political participation and representation. Thus, the Nepal protests reflect the changing nature of social movements in the 21st century: they are youth-led, digitally coordinated, and suspicious of old party elites.

Movements for Women's Bodily Rights

Since the 2010s a global wave of protest has centred on women's physical security and bodily autonomy: freedom from sexual violence and harassment, control over reproduction and freedom from state control of dress. These movements share the features of new social movements. They are largely decentralised and led by young women, they use social media hashtags, and they treat personal experience as a structural and political problem, echoing the second-wave slogan that the personal is political.

• #MeToo: the phrase was first used by the activist Tarana Burke in 2006 and went viral in October 2017 after allegations against the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. It exposed sexual harassment in workplaces across many countries. In India it took off in October 2018. M.J. Akbar resigned as Minister of State for External Affairs that month, and in February 2021 a Delhi court dismissed his defamation complaint against the journalist Priya Ramani.
• Ni Una Menos and the green wave: the first Ni Una Menos ('Not one woman less') march took place in Argentina on 3 June 2015 after the murder of a pregnant fourteen-year-old, Chiara Páez, and the movement spread across Latin America against femicide. Its green scarves became the symbol of the campaign for legal abortion, which Argentina legalised up to fourteen weeks in December 2020. The 'green wave' reached Mexico, whose Supreme Court held the criminalisation of abortion unconstitutional in 2021, and Colombia in 2022.
• Poland's Women's Strike: after the Constitutional Tribunal ruled on 22 October 2020 that abortion for foetal defects was unconstitutional, hundreds of thousands joined the largest protests in Poland since 1989, under the symbol of a red lightning bolt.
• Woman, Life, Freedom: the death of Mahsa Amini on 16 September 2022, after her arrest by Iran's morality police for 'improper' hijab, set off nationwide protests under the Kurdish slogan Jin, Jiyan, Azadi. Women burnt headscarves and cut their hair in public. Security forces killed several hundred protesters and the state executed several people over the protests, and the imprisoned activist Narges Mohammadi received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023.
• After Dobbs: on 24 June 2022 the US Supreme Court, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, overruled Roe v. Wade (1973) and held that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. Mass protests and state ballot measures followed. France responded by writing the 'guaranteed freedom' of women to have an abortion into Article 34 of its Constitution in March 2024, the first country to give abortion explicit constitutional protection.

India has its own wave. The protests after the Delhi gang rape of December 2012 led to the Justice Verma Committee and the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act 2013, which widened the definition of rape and created new offences such as stalking and voyeurism. The rape and murder of a doctor at R.G. Kar Medical College in Kolkata in August 2024 led to the 'Reclaim the Night' marches of 14 August and to a national task force on the safety of medical workers set up by the Supreme Court. The Medical Termination of Pregnancy (Amendment) Act 2021 and the Supreme Court's 2022 judgment extending safe abortion to unmarried women show the legal side of the same struggle.

These movements have changed laws and public debate, but their gains are uneven and reversible. Dobbs shows that rights can be withdrawn, Iran shows the capacity of a state to repress, and critics note that online campaigns can favour urban, middle-class women and fade without organisational depth. Feminist scholars also point to a backlash, as conservative and religious movements mobilise against reproductive rights and what they call gender ideology.

The Red Lipstick Movement

Red lipstick has served as a feminist symbol of defiance and self-assertion for more than a century. Suffrage campaigners in Britain and the United States in the 1910s are commonly associated with wearing it as a sign of independence, and during the Second World War it became an emblem of women's resilience. In recent protest it has been used to turn an object associated with femininity into a mark of resistance.

The best-documented recent case is the #SoyPicoRojo ('I am red lipstick') campaign in Nicaragua. During the protests against Daniel Ortega's government that began in April 2018, the feminist sociologist and former Sandinista guerrilla Marlen Chow was arrested and, on impulse, identified herself as a member of the 'Pico Rojo' (red lipstick), recalling the poet Claribel Alegría, who had founded an association of Nicaraguan women of that name. Women and men then posted photographs of themselves wearing red lipstick with the hashtag, and the symbol spread as a gesture of defiance against the government and of support for those detained.

• Significance for feminist rights: the movement shows how women's protest can use everyday, low-cost symbols that are hard for a state to ban, and how feminism links bodily self-expression to political freedom.
• Lipstick feminism: the campaign draws on the third-wave idea that femininity and sexual self-expression can be sources of empowerment rather than signs of subordination.
• Critique: feminists in the radical tradition, and works such as Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth (1990), argue that beauty norms are themselves a form of patriarchal control, so a cosmetic symbol may reinforce the norms it claims to subvert. Others note that hashtag symbolism can raise visibility without changing laws or power relations.

The Red Lipstick Movement thus belongs to the wider family of new social movements in which identity, the body and symbolic action, rather than the capture of state power, form the terrain of feminist politics.

Advanced Industrial vs Developing Societies

Since representative democracy has become inevitable, electoral systems have become part and parcel of any theory of democracy. Any electoral system has to be free and fair, and representative, with minimum wastage of votes. It is to be noted that democracy is needed for the protection of minorities, and hence the electoral system should be such that it gives enough space for the representation of the views of minorities. Real democracy is not majoritarian but consociational, and thus the way in which votes are counted and seats are allocated is as important as the way in which citizens participate and mobilise.

A majoritarian electoral system is designed to ensure that elected candidates or parties secure a majority of votes, more than 50%, to win an election. This system emphasises decisive outcomes: majoritarian systems simplify governance and decision-making by creating a clear winner and a stable government. However, it is also suggested that such systems marginalise smaller parties and minority groups, since the winner takes all and a large section of the electorate may remain unrepresented. There are three types of majoritarian representation systems. The simple majoritarian type is the least representative of all systems, and the maximum amount of wastage of votes occurs here, because it is based on the idea of winner takes all; its only merit is its simplicity, and it favours national parties, or parties operating at a bigger level. Examples include India's elections for the Lok Sabha and Legislative Assembly, and the election of the House of Commons in the United Kingdom. The second ballot requires the winning candidate to obtain an absolute majority and not just a plurality of votes, meaning the winning candidate must get 50% plus one of the total valid votes. There is also the possibility of two elections: in the first round, if no candidate gets an absolute majority, a second run of election takes place in which only the two top candidates participate, and since only two candidates participate, one is bound to get 50% plus one votes. This system is more representative, but it has drawbacks of unnecessary expenditure, extra burden on the electoral machinery and electoral fatigue. Examples include the presidential elections in France and Sri Lanka. The alternative vote system requires the winning candidate to secure an absolute majority, but there is no need to conduct elections a second time, and therefore it is an improvement over the second ballot. Voters write their preferences; if no candidate gets an absolute majority, the candidate who is least preferred is eliminated, the second preferences of the voters who had given the first preference to the eliminated candidate are counted, and their votes are transferred to the second preference. This transfer keeps happening until a particular candidate secures an absolute majority.

Even when an absolute majority is introduced, a large majority remains unrepresented; hence proportional representation has been introduced. Proportional representation ensures that democracy does not become the tyranny of the majority, and that the voice of minorities gets represented, though proportional representation also results in coalition governments. There are two forms of proportional representation. The Single Transferable Vote system is a form of proportional representation designed for multi-member constituencies, in which voters rank candidates in order of preference. To be elected, a candidate must achieve a specific quota of votes, calculated on the basis of the total number of valid votes and the number of seats to be filled; if a candidate surpasses the quota, the surplus votes are transferred to other candidates on the basis of the voters' subsequent preferences. If no one meets the quota, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and their votes are redistributed, and this process continues until all seats are filled, ensuring a more proportional representation of voters' preferences. In India, the STV system is employed in the election of the President, as stipulated by Article 55 of the Constitution; although the President is a single officeholder, making it a single-member constituency, the election uses a variant of STV in which the quota effectively becomes an absolute majority. The list system converts the entire country into a single, multi-member constituency; each party gets seats in the legislature in proportion to the votes it receives, and the party sends the required number of candidates, so that if a party secures 30% of the total votes, it sends 30% of the total number of candidates to the assembly. The elections in Israel are conducted in this manner, and there can also be a provision for a minimum benchmark: in Israel, a party has to get 3.25% of the votes to qualify for a seat in the legislature. In practice, it is difficult for any party to secure 50% of the total votes, and hence the list system often gives rise to coalition politics.

A comparison of advanced industrial and developing societies reveals significant differences in the way parties, pressure groups and social movements operate. In established Western democracies, political parties are typically institutionalised and operate within a framework of internal democracy, transparency and financial accountability; they often have clear ideological foundations and are less dependent on individual leaders, which ensures continuity beyond personal leadership changes. In many developing or non-Western countries, by contrast, political parties often exhibit a blend of modern organisational structures and traditional practices: parties combine formal constitutions and election machinery with personalist leadership, kinship networks, caste and communal loyalties, and the distinction between party, movement and faction is frequently blurred. In a similar vein, institutional pressure groups are more prominent in developing countries because the states in developing countries are overdeveloped states, whereas in Western countries, which normally have minimal states, they may not be as powerful; associational interest groups are more prominent in Western countries, while non-associational interest groups, being based on identity and ascription by birth, play a greater role in prismatic societies, and anomic interest groups are more visible in developing countries because of the lack of institutionalisation of democracy. Pressure group politics is most influential in the USA, and is not very powerful in countries where political parties represent a specific ideology, such as Britain, where the Labour Party is assumed to work in the interest of the working class; in developing societies, the state continues to be the dominant actor, and both parties and pressure groups operate in the shadow of a strong state. Social movements in the developing world, given the prismatic nature of society, combine old and new characteristics: the Indian environmental movement, for instance, simultaneously addresses the livelihood concerns of tribals and the poor and takes up issues of environmental protection, whereas in advanced industrial societies old and new social movements are more sharply separated by class composition, technique and ideology. Finally, electoral systems in advanced industrial democracies are often designed to balance representation and governability, whereas developing democracies frequently adopt majoritarian arrangements that favour national parties, even though such systems underrepresent minorities, small parties and regional voices; the repeated Indian exception to the Duverger law, with a multi-party system coexisting with a simple majoritarian electoral system, reminds us that the political sociology of developing societies does not simply replicate Western patterns.