Indian Politics & Policy Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2020 | Page 93

The Youth Vote in Lok Sabha Elections 2019
对党势力的虚弱及其选举策略不足 , 这些都帮助 BJP 在青年群体中的体现更为强烈。然而 , 莫迪的受欢迎度胜过了所有其他因素 , 并在青年人群中发挥了最重要的影响。
关键词 : 青年 , 印度人民党 , 投票 , 投票率 , 选举参与 , 议题 , 人民院选举
1. Introduction
India is a young nation, having two
thirds of its population below the age
of 35 years. 2 In such a scenario, the
youth vote proved to be a game changer
in the 2019 general election. To start
with, it is very complex to define youth,
as there is no general consensus on its
definition. However, for this study, we
define youth as those individuals who
are in the bracket of 18 to 25 years.
Youth are seen as the agents of
social and political change and play
an important role in electoral politics.
Nonetheless, most of the previous studies
done on voting behavior and political
participation hint toward the lower
participation of youth in electoral politics
and India is no exception. However,
the youth have been seriously engaged
in various social and political movements
in India. Due to their significant
number, no political party can afford
to ignore the interest of the young. As
in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, these
elections saw a lot of buzz around young
voters and the parties left no stone unturned
in order to attract this group. 3
The magnitude of BJP’s victory
in India’s 2019 parliamentary elections
indicates that the young voters played a
significant role and was one of the key
factors in the spectacular victory of the
BJP. The party’s vote share among young
voters was 41 percent, which is not only
7 percentage points higher than that
in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, but
also about 4 percentage points higher
that the party’s overall vote share. In
this context, the central question this
paper seeks to answer is What factors
influenced the youth vote in favor of the
BJP? While answering this question, we
also try to study how young voters are
different from voters from other age
groups in assessing the government’s
performance and the major decisions
made by the government. Before investigating
the central question by using a
logit regression model, we present the
emerging trends of voting behavior of
Indian youth by juxtaposing them with
that of other voters (non-youth, as per
our definition). The paper is organized
as follows. Section 2 delves into the voting
behavior of Indian youth. In this
section, we discuss young voter turnout,
electoral participation, and party preferences,
comparing them horizontally
(within the youth segment) and vertically
(to voters from other age groups).
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