LS Polls 2019: What Does Voter Turnout Data Tell Us?

Does higher voter turnout mean anti-incumbency or will it help the Bharatiya Janata Party?

(Photo: The Quint)

In 2014, India saw its highest voter turnout of 66 percent, but this time in the first five phases alone, the average voter turnout has been even higher at 68.6 percent compared to the 67.3 percent for the same constituencies in 2014. What does this hint at?

Does higher voter turnout mean anti-incumbency or will it help the Bharatiya Janata Party?

Neelanjan Sircar, senior visiting fellow, Centre for Policy Research and professor at Ashoka University joined BloombergQuint’s Harsha Subramaniam to analyse what led to the higher voter turnout in the first five phases of the seven phases in Lok Sabha 2019 elections.

Sircar, who made a comparison between the data from 2019 and 2014 Lok Sabha elections, said that the 2014 data is official. However, the current election data is still provisional and that is the reason why he is sticking to the first five phases, Sircar said.

“I have looked at all of the data from 2014 as official. We have the actual data, but for 2019, I have looked at the data from the Election Commission which is provisional. They’re constantly updating the data and until we actually have the final election result, the total number of electors, the data will not be certified in terms of turnout,” he said.

Higher voter turnout traditionally has meant anti-incumbency, but is it a straightforward conclusion? Sircar said the answer to this is not that simple. One has to look both at the national and constituency level of voter turnout.

According to him, the answer is complicated because in 2014, the real innovation of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah combo is that they organisationally created a way of mobilising voters in a manner that it had never been done before. So it could be that a boost in turnout this time is associated with just a stronger BJP organisation. But he also argued that it could be a standard trend of anti-incumbency.

While talking of factors and trends around the turnout, Sircar said that the urban-rural analysis is not clear in terms of turnout.

“If I give you six states in India: Bihar, UP, MP, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Gujarat. Here the BJP won 70 percent of their seats and they have a strike rate of over 90 percent. They are the lowest turnout states in India and each of them saw almost double digit increases in turnout over 2009 in 2014. So that is what we think of as a Modi wave, the Modi wave effect was huge increase in turnout,” he said.

He further explained that in the states with highest number of voter turnout like West Bengal, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, the BJP had only a strike rate of 7 percent and not much of an increase in turnout was observed over 2009 in 2014.