Indian Politics & Policy Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2020 | Page 57

Understanding Voting Patterns by Class in the 2019 Indian Election
class voting comparisons with 2014 except
minimally and for some possible
explanations of outcomes based in the
literature. We turn to the scant theorizing
about Indian class voting behavior
at the end of the paper in an attempt to
explain the findings.
Outcomes: Turnout and
Party Preference
Table 2: Economic Class * Turnout 2019
Economic Class Turnout (%)
Poor 66
Lower 66
Middle 70
Rich 67
Source: NES (2019)
Table 3: Economic Class * Turnout 2019 *
Locality (Figures in %)
Economic Class
Locality
Rural Town City
Poor 68 63 55
Lower 67 58 66
Middle 72 59 68
Rich 69 52 70
Total 69 60 65
Source: NES 2019
Class turnout ranged from 66.1
percent for the Poor to 69.6 percent
for the Middle class (Table
2).The overall inter-class differential
was small, and the overall turnout of
66.8 percent was largely determined by
rural locations (actual turnout calculated
by CSDS from Election Commission
data was 67 percent). Differentiating by
location, rural (73 percent of respondents)
turnout was 68.6 percent, with
the rural Middle class at 71.6 percent;
town (16 percent of the respondents)
turnout was a low 59.8 percent, with the
Rich at a very low 52 percent; and city
(11 percent of the respondents) turnout
was 65 percent, with the Rich at
69.6 percent and the Poor at a low 54.8
percent (Table 3). There is no discernible
reason for lower turnout in towns
compared to cities and rural areas. Perhaps
campaigning and campaign organization
was stronger in both cities and
rural areas.
Class party preferences were
as follows (Table 4). The BJP got 37.4
percent of the votes of respondents,
and Congress got 19.5 percent, exactly
matching their national vote shares.
The four classes voted for the BJP as
follows: Rich at 44 percent, Middle at
38 percent, Lower at 36 percent, and
Poor at 36 percent, showing the by now
well-known but still only slight bias toward
the BJP compared to the national
average by the two upper classes and a
surprisingly high pro-BJP vote from the
Poor, but a spread of only 8 percent between
the highest vote for the BJP and
the lowest across the four classes. For
Congress, the classes voted as follows:
Rich at 20 percent, Middle at 21 percent,
Lower at 21 percent, and Poor at
17 percent. Overall, the poll shows fairly
narrow class differences in party preference
around the national average for
each of the two major parties, with the
Poor voting for the BJP twice as much
as for Congress, roughly matching the
overall pattern. The spread in BJP preferences
between Rich and Poor is only
8 percent.
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