Indian Politics & Policy Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2020 | Page 53

Understanding Voting Patterns by Class in the 2019 Indian Election Eswaran Sridharan Indian Politics & Policy • Vol. 3, No. 1 • Spring 2020 Academic Director and Chief Executive Officer, University of Pennsylvania Institute for the Advanced Study of India [email protected] Abstract This paper attempts to understand and explain patterns of voting by class in the 2019 Indian election based on the CSDS/Lokniti post-election survey data. The focus is on patterns of voting preference for the two major parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Indian National Congress (Congress or INC). The thrust of the analysis will be to try to explain why there is so little difference in voter preferences across the four-class division in the Lokniti survey dataset. The paper proceeds as follows. Following a brief description of the Lokniti survey’s classification of social classes and its comparison with 2014, the paper describes turnout and party preference across social classes, further disaggregated by breakdown by caste/community, age group and rural-urban location. It next asks whether economic questions including the government’s many welfare schemes affected voter preferences across classes. Coming to the conclusion that economic conditions as felt by the voters and the government’s schemes did not produce major class-wise differences in voter preferences as regards parties, the question arises as to what explains fairly uniform party preferences across classes. The paper then proceeds to look at broader questions of attitudes towards leadership, nationalism and minorities that might affect class voting patterns in a way that produces relatively small differences. Finally, bringing in findings from the literature the paper, somewhat speculatively, explains the above results from the dataset. Keywords: class, caste, community, turnout, leadership, nationalism, minorities, welfare programmes 49 doi: 10.18278/inpp.3.1.5