Indian Politics & Policy Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2020 | Page 69

Understanding Voting Patterns by Class in the 2019 Indian Election
timent across classes that the questions
on minorities pick up (despite majority
opinion being pluralist overall).
Second, one needs to also look
at patterns of class self-identification in
India and see whether they follow patterns
that have long been picked up in
Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development (OECD) countries
in the social stratification literature.
There is very little data on this and
none from 2019, but Kapur and Vaishnav
showed that as high as 49 percent of
respondents in their large 2014 survey
self-identified as middle class, whereas
all socioeconomic estimates of the middle
class put the figure at much less (see
Aslany for estimates in the literature;
her own estimate is 28 percent 5 ). 6 The
49 percent figure for self-identification
as middle class is much closer to the
majority self-identification as middle
class in OECD countries than to Indian
economic realities and relativities. Are
we then seeing, along with and perhaps
as a by-product of three decades of sustained
high growth post-1991, an “aspirational”
middle class that while being
below the economic and social middle
class cut-offs, still identifies “upwardly”
or “aspirationally” with the upper and
middle classes, including in political
and party preferences? My speculation,
in the absence of hard data, is that the
relative absence of significant class differences
in party preference in 2019 in
responses to most questions is the result
of a complex interaction between
growing Hindu identity politics, perceived
strong and effective leadership,
“upward” or “aspirational” class identification,
and effectively implemented
welfare programs.
Notes
1 Asian Development Bank, “Poverty Data: India,” https://www.adb.org/countries/india/poverty.
2 M. Aslany, “The Indian Middle Class, its Size, and Urban-Rural Variations,”Contemporary
South Asia 27 (2019): 196–213.
3 C. Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2007).
4 E. Sridharan, “Class Voting in the 2014 Lok Sabha Elections: The Growing Size and Importance
of the Middle Classes,”Economic and Political Weekly XLIX (2014): 72–76; T. Thachil,
“Elite Parties and Poor Voters: Theory and Evidence from India,”American Political Science
Review 108 (2014).
5 Aslany, “The Indian Middle Class.”
6 D. Kapur and M. Vaishnav, “Being Middle Class in India,”The Hindu, January 10, 2015.
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