Qual Quant (2012) 46:949–958 DOI 10.1007/s11135-011-9454-9 Looking for voting paradoxes in Indian elections Santanu Gupta Published online: 27 February 2011 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011 Abstract We try to find out a methodology for identifying Borda Paradox and Condorcet Paradox in the absence of information on preference profile of citizens, and try to apply the same to find out existence of such paradoxes in the 2004 Indian Parliamentary elections. Keywords Voting paradoxes · Condorcet · Borda · Electoral alliances 1 Introduction Although, voting paradoxes have been well well documented in the theoretical literature, there are still attempts to identify the actual occurrences of these paradoxes. Klitgaard (2008) has tried to look for voting paradoxes under proportional elections with data from the Dan- ish elections. Coleman and Pountney (1978) look for the theoretical likelihood and electoral occurrences of Borda Voting Paradox using sample surveys of preference ordering of citizens from 1966 British Elections. However, since most electoral systems do not ask for prefer- ence ordering from citizens, deciphering the preference ordering and therefore identifying the occurrences of the paradoxes becomes a difficult task. This paper tries to address this specific issue of how much can be deciphered about voting paradoxes from election results of the first past the post system of the kind that is prevalent in India. The next section discusses some features of Indian elections which might affects the identification of voting paradoxes, Section 3 discusses ways to decipher occurrences of a Borda Paradox in the Indian con- text, Section 4 discusses ways to identify the occurrence of a Condorcet Paradox. Section 5 concludes. S. Gupta (B ) XLRI, School of Business and Human Resources, C. H. Area (East), Jamshedpur, Jharkhand, India e-mail: santanu@xlri.ac.in 123