Indian Politics & Policy Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2020 | Page 49

Do Issues Matter in Indian Elections?
niers argue that “ethnic voting” continues
to prevail over issue-based voting,
caste-based mobilization remains at the
heart of parties’ electoral strategies, and
voting patterns show no sign of shifting
toward more issue-based platforms. 35
However, in case of the 2014 and
2019 general elections, this paper does
not fully endorse the view cited above.
We find that the top four issues play
a significant role in determining the
vote for BJP in 2014, whereas in 2019,
respondents who thought about the
issues of unemployment and price increase
tended to move their vote away
from the BJP, since they felt that the incumbent
had not faired well on these
parameters. Development and corruption,
while still featuring among the top
issues, are not significant predictors of
the BJP vote in 2019. However, we feel
that issues may not be the only determining
factor in a diversified electoral
democracy like India. Thachil finds
through primary survey and fieldwork
that in different parts of India, different
strategies may work for “elite political
parties” to garner votes of the poor. In
some places, ethnic cleavages could be
exploited; in others, poor voters could
be provided “elite-centered patronage;”
and in still others, a welfare- and service-based
approach may be better at
garnering political support.
Given that the elections are a
mandate of the people, possible alternate
speculations can be made regarding
the reason that voters’ issue preferences
do not translate into voting
choice for parties other than the BJP
(in this case, Congress). First, the voters
may have wanted to give the BJP-led
NDA government another chance in office
to fulfill the promises it had made.
Second, there may have been no appropriate
alternate present apart from the
BJP. Finally, there may have been something
else altogether that was going on
in the minds of the voters that was not
captured by this survey. In conclusion,
we would like to highlight the fact that
the importance of issues during elections
can neither be discounted nor
overlooked in a robust democracy such
as India’s, although there may be many
other factors playing out at the ground
level that may not be captured by surveys
and that may need other methods
to be revealed.
Notes
1 The authors are thankful to the two anonymous reviewers who provided detailed comments
and input for improvement. The paper was originally presented at Lokniti-CSDS, Delhi in
April 2017 at a conference on “Explorations in Indian Democracy” with 2014 NES data. We
would also like to acknowledge the comments received from Pradeep Chhibber, Irfan Nooruddin,
Siddharth Swaminathan, and Sandeep Shastri since the inception of the paper, and the
encouragement of Suhas Palshikar and K.C. Suri to expand our analysis to the NES 2019 data.
Finally, we are indebted to Sanjay Kumar, Sumit Ganguly, and Surupa Gupta for providing us
with the platform to publish this paper. The authors take full responsibility for the analysis and
any unintentional errors that may have occurred in the paper.
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