The Whip System in Parliamentary Democracy in India and Network and Cascades
https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/opinion/invaluable-but-imperfect-pillars-of-our-democracy
The essence of a parliamentary democracy which directly elects its local representatives which then elect the Prime Minister is to ensure proper representation of the people of the country in every parliamentary legislation made. This was similar in the case of Indian democracy, until when a whip system was introduced. The article amongst discussing other flaws in the Indian democracy, discusses the menace of the whip system. The article talks about how when the whip is introduced, the directly elected members of parliament (MP) lose their independent agency and must abide by party line, almost literally whipping the MP’s to fall in line. For instance, if the parliament is deciding on whether to allow foreign direct investments in retail, which may jeopardize small local businesses, if a party decided to vote in favor, all the MP’s must vote in favor irrespective of the concerns of the people of their own respective constituency. This in a sense oppresses the will of the people and therefore undermines democracy.
Now, the reason it undermines democracy could also be understood from the theory of cascading. A new legislation, for instance, can be assumed to be like a new option offered to the nodes of a network. In the current whip system, the nodes are political parties, groups of which may have either affiliations or ‘understandings’ between each other, which then make decisions based on their thresholds. However, in the original system, as envisioned by the founding fathers, the nodes would have been the directly elected MPs. Now, this network of MPs obviously would have connected clusters based on political parties, but it may also have other clusters, based on say the geography that the MPs represent or the class of people the MPs represent. Some may be elected from rural areas while some from urban. Some may be elected from a farmer dominated region while some from more working class dominated areas. These different types of connections between the MPs would be obviously more complicated, however, they would also be more representative of the actual composition of the country. In this case, introducing a new legislation and its adoption by the MPs would then depend on these clusters. So a seemingly anti-farmer policy would find it difficult to be cascaded into the pro-farmer cluster of nodes irrespective, or at least not as impacted by party affiliations.
This helps us understand how a representative democracy should work and why it makes sense to not have a whip system, while applying the theory of cascading.