Indian Politics & Policy Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2020 | Page 19

Economic Evaluations and the Incumbent Vote in India’s Parliamentary Elections (2014, 2019)
and reward prosperity-enhancing performance.
That is, voters who perceive
an improvement in their economic
conditions are more likely to vote for
the incumbent relative to those who
perceive deterioration in their household
economic conditions.
The version of the economic vote
hypothesis I test here is as follows:
Voters who evaluate their household economic
conditions as having improved
over the past five years are more likely to
vote for the incumbent party or coalition.
Conversely, voters who evaluate their
household economic conditions as having
deteriorated over the past five years
are less likely to vote for the incumbent
party or coalition.
As the hypothesis states, I expect
a positive correlation between a positive
perception of household economic conditions
compared to five years ago and
the incumbent vote choice and a negative
correlation between a negative retrospective
evaluation and the likelihood
of a voter choosing the incumbent.
Empirical Strategy: Model,
Data, and Variables
I
begin the empirical section by presenting
the statistical model employed
to estimate the relationship
between a respondent’s retrospective
evaluation of household economic conditions
and the likelihood of voting
for the incumbent, controlling for the
effects of partisanship, time, and other
socioeconomic and demographic
characteristics. I then describe the data
source and the coding rules used to
create the dependent and independent
variables used in this analysis.
In order to estimate a multivariate
statistical association between incumbent
vote and the set of independent
variables of interest, I specify a
logistic regression model that takes the
form:
ln[Pr(V i
=1)/1-Pr(V i
=1)] = β 0
+
β 1
X i
+ + β 2
E i
+ β 3
Year i
Where Pr(V i
=1) is the probability
that the respondent votes for the
incumbent, and the term ln[Pr(V i
=1)/
(1-Pr(V i
=1))] is the natural log of the
odds. 15 X i
represents the set of political,
social, economic, and demographic
characteristics of the respondent, including
incumbent party attachment,
caste-community identity, economic
class, gender, and location. Finally, E i
measures a respondent’s evaluation of
household economic conditions, and
Year marks time periods.
The data used in this study comes
from the NES 2014 and 2019 post-poll
surveys that contain 22295 and 23134
observations, respectively. The surveys,
conducted by Lokniti Programme for
Comparative Democracy of the Centre
for Study of Developing Societies
(CSDS), are administered to a representative
sample of voters across India in
the days immediately following voting.
The survey collects information on vote
choice, political attitudes, preferences
across political and policy alternatives,
opinions on current political events,
and patterns of political and social participation,
among other variables of in-
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