ABSTRACT
According to the ‘mirror approach’, the legislature in a representative democracy should be the microcosm of the populace. In this sense, a legislature does not merely reflect horizontal representation; it also mirrors vertical representation of the citizenry. This means that every social group is represented in the house proportionate to its share in the total population although many social groups cannot be represented through elections due to not having the critical number. One of the bases of such argument is that in a society consisting of intensely diverse population in terms of caste, ethnicity, religion, language and so on, if public institutions, especially elected assemblies, are dominated by one particular group or the other, the future of democracy is uncertain, for such a situation has the potential to create serious political tensions. This chapter is an attempt to trace how broad-based the representation of Punjab Legislative Assembly (PLA) has been with two salient objectives: (a) to assess the trend in the social composition of PLA over the periods of time, and (b) to analyse underlying factors that have caused the change in the social composition of PLA.
