Indian Politics & Policy Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2020 | Page 35
Do Issues Matter in Indian Elections?
Prashant Kumar Choudhary
Assistant Professor at BMS College of Law in Bengaluru
[email protected]
Reetika Syal
Assistant Professor at the Centre for Research in Social Sciences
and Education, JAIN (Deemed-to-be University) in Bengaluru
[email protected]
Tarun Arora
Indian Politics & Policy • Vol. 3, No. 1 • Spring 2020
Senior Researcher at the Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and
Democracy in Bengaluru
[email protected]
Abstract
Do Indian voters think about election issues before voting? If so,
how closely do they relate the issues to the party that raised them,
and how likely are they to vote for that party? The paper analyses
national survey data by Lokniti- Centre for the Study of Developing
Societies, for the two most prominent parties, Indian National
Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from 2014 and
2019 national elections and finds that election issues do have an
importance in the minds of the voters. We have evidence to suggest
that BJP was able to strike the ‘issue-based electoral chord’ with the
voters in 2014 and succeeded. However, in 2019, we have evidence
that even though the prominent issues were the same, only a few
issues out of those significantly mattered to the voters (price rise
and unemployment) and shifted their voting preference against
the incumbent government. We also explore how voters’ choice of
political party may have varied on the basis of other demographic
factors such as caste, religion, education etc.
Keywords: election issue, political parties, democracy, voting
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doi: 10.18278/inpp.3.1.4