Indian Politics & Policy Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2020 | Page 48

Indian Politics & Policy
In the 2019 general election,
price increase and unemployment were
two significant issues that steered the
votes away from the BJP. Corruption
and development did not show up as
significant variables to determine vote
choice. This becomes significant in
light of a newspaper report 33 that mentioned
that in an unprompted question
regarding the most important issue
for the respondent while voting in this
election, 12 percent of the respondents
interviewed across the country (for the
Lokniti NES Survey) answered unemployment.
It was only when asked a
specific closed-ended question about
joblessness that most of the respondents
said that it was a serious issue for
them. Newspaper reports also showed
that although unemployment and price
increase weighed heavily on the voters’
mind, it was the presence of other
factors, such as schemes for underprivileged
persons, providing LPG cylinders,
constructing toilets for the rural
population, etc., that were successful
in garnering votes for the BJP. 34 Gender
turned out to be not a significant
variable in determining votes for BJP
in 2019, as compared to 2014. The results
of the religion variable matched
those of 2014. In the caste variable,
the ST and OBC respondents imitated
the 2014 results and were significantly
less likely to vote for the BJP than their
non-minority counterparts. However,
the SC results show a significant positive
vote for the BJP in 2019 elections.
Respondents with income more than
Rs. 5000 were significantly less likely
to vote for the BJP in 2019 than their
counterparts. Rural residents changed
their preferences from 2014 and were
significantly more likely to vote for the
BJP than urban respondents. The education
variable again provides interesting
results for 2019, where matric and
above educated respondents were significantly
more likely to vote for the BJP.
The same result holds true for youth
respondents as well. Even though the
top-most issues were same in both the
2014 and 2019 general elections, our
analysis shows that people who thought
about the issues and the performance
of the BJP government over the last five
years were less likely to vote for the BJP
in 2019, as compared to 2014. Despite
this, the BJP secured one of the highest
mandates in the history of Indian elections
in 2019.
V. Conclusion
This paper highlights how issues
mold voter preferences during
elections and while casting their
votes. Political parties set the election
tone by invoking important issues,
which may be based on their favorable
performance over the last few years.
Similarly, for the opposition parties,
these issues could include either an underperformance/underachievement
of
the incumbent government or a promise
to achieve more than the incumbent,
given a chance. The latter was the case
in 2014 elections by the BJP, where it
highlighted many lacunae of the incumbent
Congress government and
was able to gather support for its promise
to perform better on the said issues.
Discounting the importance of issues
for the 2009 elections, Jaffrelot and Ver-
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