Indian Politics & Policy Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2020 | Page 38

Indian Politics & Policy
evidence to show that voters respond
to it the way political parties expect
them to.
In this light, the present paper
explores the voting behavior of Indian
citizens in relation to the issues raised
during general elections, and how closely
the voters feel that they were important
issues for them, to the extent that
they affected their voting choice. We
look at the National Election Studies
(NES) survey data from Lokniti-Centre
for the Study of Developing Societies
(CSDS) for 2014 and 2019. The paper
is divided into four sections. We start
by giving a brief overview of the issues
that were prominent during the previous
two general elections, and then
present a descriptive analysis of the issues
raised during the general elections
of 2014 and 2019, with respect to some
of the demographic details of voters,
such as caste, class, religion, gender, etc.
This is followed by an analysis of the
above-mentioned variables with voting
patterns for Congress and the BJP
through a logistic regression model.
The paper concludes with a discussion
of the analysis.
II. The Role of Issues in
Indian Elections Over Time
The debate among Marxist and
liberal scholars of political science
on determining voter behavior
is on the question of whether
voting is a determinant of class or
of free will of the voter, and therefore
largely issue-based. 9 National and state
elections in India have been contested
on a range of issues, such as basic amenities,
price increase, corruption, and
economic reforms, to religious issues,
including Ram temple and Ram setu
(bridge), secularism, the rights of forest
dwellers, reservations to deprived
communities in education and jobs,
development, etc. We observe no set
pattern of issues raised during general
elections, although some commonalities
are noticed. This section attempts
to provide a brief overview of the prominent
elections since independence and
provides a retrospective context of the
circumstances under which the elections
took place and the issues the voters
responded to during those elections.
Looking back at the very first
general election that took place in independent
India, it was supposedly the
personalities and the common man’s
notion of the kind of government that
they wanted for their country, which
were highlighted as the most important
concerns of the people, 10 with the Congress
Party stressing emotional issues,
old loyalties, caste, ethnic groups, and
communal feelings. 11 By the late 1960s,
Palmer observes that for most voters,
the issues had become more local or
regional, as per the constituencies. The
larger issues of the survival of Indian
democracy, economic development, or
foreign policy did not seem to figure
among the top priorities. 12 Even the
leading national dailies observed that
the people of the country were more
concerned with parochial issues. 13 It
was during the election of 1971 that Indira
Gandhi attempted to bring out issues
of national importance and steered
away from the politics of patronage. 14
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