The Politics and Demographics of Indian Electoral Democracy: Assessing the 2019 Verdict

Voting behavior reflects the revealed preferences of the electorate. The study of preferences is of interest to multiple disciplines. Here we have tried to decipher the mandate of the population in two steps-(1) we look at the 2019 elections and put political theories regarding elections to test; (2) we analyse the election data to draw conclusions about the role played by the demographic composition of constituencies and the states they belong to. Tracing the reasons for BJP’s win and the electoral verdict of 2019 in the first section, we analyse numbers to see how the parties have fared. The second section includes how the spheres of caste, religion and gender have been the determining forces. The former highlights the role of segmentation to create smaller capture groups by parties. The sense of belonging to special ethnic groups strongly effects voting pattern indicating the need for further analysis of the same. In the latter, we address the interesting question of the observable characteristics of a candidate that make a winner. Diving further into the gender aspect we study the demographic features of constituencies with female winners. These questions are important to study the structure of our electoral democracy and how changes in our demographic composition can affect the same.