Punjab's electoral history has been a two-party system between the Congress and the Akali Dal, with the Bharatiya Janata Party and its predecessor as the Akali Dal's urban Hindu partner, and the left parties holding pockets.
That structure held for sixty years. In 2017 the Aam Aadmi Party became the main opposition and in 2022 it won 92 of 117 seats, the largest majority in the state's history, and both the Congress and the Akali Dal collapsed.
Punjab's turnout is high, its rural constituencies are decisive, and its politics has been organised around the same set of unresolved questions since 1966: river waters, Chandigarh, agricultural prices and the relationship with the centre.
Panchayat and cooperative elections, and SGPC elections, are contested on party lines and are the base layer of the system.
Every Punjab government of every party has kept the free agricultural power supply since it began in 1997, apart from the years from 2002 to 2005 when Amarinder Singh's government charged for it, and that is a fair indicator of where the actual constraint on Punjab's politics lies.
From the 1960s to 2017 the state alternated between the Akali Dal, usually with the BJP, and the Congress, in a pattern so regular that the result was often predicted from the cycle alone.
The Akali Dal's base is rural, Jat Sikh and tied to the SGPC and the cooperative structures. The Congress held the urban Hindu vote and a share of the rural one.
2022 broke the pattern. The Aam Aadmi Party won a very large majority with no previous base in the state, and what replaces the old alignment is not yet clear.