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 31 doi: 10.18278/inpp.3.1.4