Indian Politics & Policy Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2020 | Page 44

Indian Politics & Policy
years of age are considered youths), and
education (coded into non-literate and
those who report any education level).
IV. Factors Affecting
Responses to Election Issues
and Voting Choices
In this section, we highlight how different
demographic characteristics
such as caste, class, gender, religion,
etc. affect the opinion of respondents
on whether they gave importance to
an issue while voting or not. Figure 1
presents the voters’ demography details
vis-à-vis their responses to mentioning
an issue that was important to them
while voting. If a voter responded to the
question by mentioning an issue, they
were categorized under “issues,” and if
they did not mention any issue, they
were categorized under “no issues.” Figure
1 displays those respondents who
volunteered an issue. The intention for
including this is to acknowledge that
demographic characteristics play a role
in determining whether a respondent
would be more likely to mention an
issue that would influence their voting
choice or not. This ties up with many
recent studies on Indian elections that
note that demographic factors play an
important role in determining voter
choices, even though the voting preferences
within each group may not
be homogenous. For example, Kumar
notes that within the Indian society that
many parties are rooted in particular
castes, and they mention them as their
social base, which is quite useful for
political mobilization in present-day
politics. 29 He mentions that “caste remains
an important consideration of
the voting choices for a sizeable number
of voters.” Similarly, Deshpande argues
that even though women do not
vote as a bloc, or homogenously, 30 their
voting choices are different from that of
their male counterparts. 31 We also have
an acknowledgement by Kailash of the
fact that “bahujans (scheduled castes,
scheduled tribes, poor, women and rural
respondents) are less likely to offer
a political opinion, than their counterparts.”
32
In light of the above findings, Figure
1 shows that in the 2014 and 2019
elections, a greater number of male respondents
were likely to consider some
election issue while voting than their female
counterparts. Similarly, a slightly
higher percentage of Hindus were likely
to mention electoral issues as compared
to their Muslim counterparts. We also
observe a difference in the percentage
of OBC respondents who were more
likely to provide an electoral issue
that influenced their voting, followed
by the Other Caste respondents, and
SC respondents in 2014. It is however
noteworthy that there were hardly any
differences when it came to expressing
an opinion on electoral issues in 2019
among respondents from different
castes. Even through the lens of locality
of residence of the respondent, we see
that there is only a 4-percentage point
difference between urban and rural respondents
in 2014. This difference lowered
to 2 percentage points in 2019.
We see similar responses from
the youth and the literates, as compared
to their counterparts in 2014 and 2019.
However, note that there is a large differ-
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