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
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doi: 10.18278/inpp.3.1.5