Voting in India: Effects of Economic Change and New Party Formation

Abstract

Like voters elsewhere in the world, Indian voters live in a political environment of conflicting influences, some of which encourage political continuity while others promote change. How do they choose, and why do they change their votes from one election to another? Does Indian voting behavior support prospective or retrospective voting theory? India has had ten general elections to the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Parliament, from 1951 to 1991. The Congress Party, usually led by Jawaharlal Nehru or one of his descendants, has won eight of them but failed in two-1977 and 1989. Although the Congress Party got 49.3% of the vote in 1984 and only 34.5% in 1977, a range of about 15%, the fluctuation has usually been only about 5% between 40% and 45%. These fluctuations are most commonly attributed to various public activities,' e.g., Indira Gandhi's promise to get rid of poverty in 1971, her repressive and autocratic rule before the 1977 election, internal strife in the Janata Party before the 1979 election, sympathy for the party of an assassinated leader in the 1984 (Indira) and 1991 (Rajiv Gandhi) elections, and governmental corruption in 1989. Such issue-oriented explanations may be intuitively persuasive, and indeed may sometimes be correct, but they leave a key question unanswered: why do these issues or conditions become salient in some elections and not others? Political parties often have promised to solve economic problems; both the Congress and Janata par-