The term “measuring voting behavior and attitudes” of the electorates immediately brings to mind the numerous election surveys and exit polls that take place whenever elections are held in India. Opinion polls for measuring voting behavior and for making seat forecasts in electronic and print media have now become a regular feature during elections. The swing of votes and early gains and losses for political parties and candidates that are ahead in the electoral fray make newspaper headlines and bytes on television channels throughout the election period. Election surveys are conducted by media and polling organizations all over the world to measure the popular mood of the voter during the elections, to find out issues that would be crucial in the elections, the voter's choice of political parties and leaders, and the voting intentions of the electorates. The opinion polls do an in-depth and holistic measurement of voting behavior and opinion of the electorates that include gains and losses for political parties or candidates in terms of vote share and their winnability chances in the elections. The measurement of voting behavior in the broad framework means approximation of the electorate's opinion and views on various facets of electoral competition in numerical terms based on a sample survey of registered voters. The opinion and attitudes of the voters are gathered through empirical research and are quantified or translated into figures to provide a macro-view generalization about electoral trends and patterns in the elections. A sample survey is done to collect data on the electoral behavior of the voters that is representative and mirrors reflection of the opinion and views of the total electorate. The data collected through empirical research are used along with the available secondary data on elections to compute voting behavior and attitudes.
The term “measuring voting behavior and attitudes” has different connotations for different academic disciplines and the method and determinants they use to probe them are also different from each other. There are several approaches used by social science disciplines for measuring voting behavior like sociological, political, ecological or aggregate statistical, sociopsychological, and rational choice. Thus it becomes pertinent to deliberate and discuss the different connotations of the term “voting behavior” and find out whether these disciplines use completely different measurement approaches or whether they share some common variables of probe and draw from each other in their research methods. The interpretation of the term “voting behavior” and the different approaches in measuring voting behavior and attitudes of the voters will help in understanding the nuances and finer aspects of the various methods used in a comparative framework. The origin of the study and statistical analysis of elections can be located within the discipline of political science which with the passage of time developed into a subdiscipline called Psephology. Psephology is the study of elections based on precinct data on voting, public opinion polls for gauging the mood of the voters, information on campaign finance and other available statistical data on elections. This raises some competing questions like why are opinion polls done to study electoral competition when secondary data on elections are available and what are the aspects of electoral behavior that is probed and analyzed by such polls. Similarly what is the purpose for measuring voting behavior and attitudes of the electorate and how are the collected data used and utilized. The answer to these posers and questions connected with it will be elaborately discussed and detailed in the relevant sections of this chapter.
This chapter is divided into two sections: The first section deals with the meaning of the term “measurement” as used by physical and life sciences and what it means for election studies. It tries to find out how voting behavior can be measured and what are the scales used for computing them. It discusses whether the measurement of behavior, opinion, and views of the electorate can be done with similar accuracy as measurements of phenomena are done in various disciplines of pure and applied sciences. This section figures out the aspects of voting behavior and attitudes that are usually computed by popular opinion polls in India. It enumerates the different connotations of the term voting behavior and approaches adopted for measuring it by various disciplines of social science. This section also focuses on different kinds of variables and probes that are used for measuring voting behavior and the interdisciplinary sharing of domain knowledge and research methods. The focus in the second section will be on the reasons why opinion polls are conducted to compute the voting behavior and attitudes of the electorates during the elections. It explains the purpose of measuring voting behavior based on voters’ opinion and feedback and how it helps in understanding and statistically analyzing the voting patterns and trends in elections. This section also deals with the reasons for conducting opinion poll-based election studies in India and highlights how the probes are different from the background variables that are used for research by opinion polls conducted in other parts of the globe.
Voting Behavior—Different Connotations and Approaches
The term “measurement” in physical and life sciences is defined as the approximation or estimation of ratios of quantities that can be determined with a degree of precision. Thus entities like length, height, weight, heartbeat, blood pressure, etc., can be quantified and measured with high levels of accuracy. Quantification and measurement in science are mutually defined as “quantitative attributes are those that can be measured in some predefined units and stated in figures.” Accurate measurement is essential in many fields of study and all measurements are necessarily approximations of the phenomena and events with the maximum levels of accuracy that is humanly possible. Like in physical or life science disciplines, election studies also try to scientifically measure the voting behavior and attitudes of the electorates in quantitative terms with high levels of accuracy. However, election studies measure voting behavior and attitudes that are hypothetical or surreal unlike physical sciences that measure entities that are real and tangible. Behavior and attitudes are intangible entities that are constructed to ascertain the response tendencies of a group and cannot be measured as exactly and precisely as entities that are measured in the disciplines of science. The voting behavior and attitude comprise of views and orientations of the voters that represent the majority characteristics of the total electorates. Thus election studies measure the voting behavior and attitude of a sample of voters quantitatively to make generalizations or inferences for the total electorates. Thus voting behavior and attitudes can be measured in quantitative terms with a fair amount of accuracy using various scientific scaling options but not as precisely as it is done in physical and life sciences. This contention is reiterated by Yogendra Yadav, one of the leading political analysts in India, who feels “psephology is not a discipline, a science like microbiology is. Psephology is nothing more than election studies” (Indian Express, Sunday, January 27, 2008).
This raises the question how voting behavior and attitudes are commonly measured and the kind of scales that are used for measuring them in quantitative terms. There are various research methods for studying the voting behavior of the electorates like sample survey, case study, and participation observatory study. However, case studies and observation studies do not use quantitative methods for studying elections, so voting behavior cannot be measured in certain terms. Thus a sample survey of the electorate remains the most commonly used method for measurement of voting behavior as it generates quantitative data for analysis and drawing inferences. For measurement of voting behavior and attitudes, the questions used in opinion polls have answer variables that are assigned mathematical values or numerical codes. There are different measurement scales that are used for quantifying the responses and the choice of a scale to be used for a particular question depends upon what the question intends to probe. The scale that is quite often used in election surveys is the nominal scale in which a numerical value is assigned to each category of response to differentiate them from each other. For example, all the states and union territories in India can be classified under this scale by assigning different numerals that can be used for identification of the names of the states while analyzing the data.
Another scale that is most commonly used in election studies is the ordinal scale as it helps in ranking or prioritization of voter's response. Thus questions like voters’ choice of leaders, issues that are most important have ordinal scales for ranking them. They are ranked as first, second, third, and so on, depending upon the opinion and assessment of the voters. The ordinal scale can bring out, who has more or less an attribute of an ideal political leader but not how much more or less from being an ideal leader. For this an interval scale is used as it reveals the degree of difference between two leaders on the attributes of being an ideal leader. Thus the interval scale is an improvement over the ordinal scale and brings out the comparative differences more sharply and clearly. Another scale that is used for measuring voting behavior and attitudes is the Likert scale. In this scale, voters are asked to respond on a battery of statements in the “agree” and “disagree” format with the answer options of strongly agree, agree, disagree, or strongly disagree. Apart from the measurement scales as discussed, there are large numbers of measurement scales that are used for computing the behavior and attitudes in sample surveys but these are the scales that are more often used in opinion polls on elections.
The phrase “voting behavior” connotes more than just an examination of voting records, a compilation of voting statistics, and a computation of electoral shifts. It means analysis of individual psychological processes like perception, emotion, and motivation and their relation to the vote decision of group structures and functions and their relation to political action, as well as of institutional patterns, such as the communication process, and their impact on elections (Eldersveld, 1951). Voting behavior and attitudes include the analysis of the voting intentions of the voters, whom they would vote for or have voted for, what are the considerations of the voting, issues that have an impact on their voting decisions, voters’ satisfaction levels with the performance of the government, and the popularity ratings of leadership and the ruling party. It also includes the participatory norms of the voters and their levels of participation in the elections. The terms “political behavior” and “voting behavior” to most political and social scientists are not meant to suggest a behavior study which is essentially different in a conceptual sense from many other types of studies. What is different in studying political behavior or voting behavior is not the principle of behavior, or the content of behavior, but rather the context in which the individual's behavior is being examined; namely, the context of governmental institutions (Eldersveld, 1951).
The term “measuring voting behavior and attitudes” has different connotations for different academic disciplines and the factors/variables that they probe and compute are also different from each other. The sociological or social contextual approach refers to the social setting in which individuals or voters function and their voting behavior is affected by it (Johnson et al., 1999). “Contextual theories of politics are built on an assertion of behavioral interdependence: the actions of individual citizens are to be understood as the intersection between individually defined circumstances” (Huckfeldt and Sprague, 1993: 281). In this regard, individual behavior is contingent upon the environment created by the aggregation of individual traits. “A theory is contextual when variation in some aggregated individual trait (mean income, percent white, etc.) produces variation in an observed individual behavior among individuals who share the aggregate trait” (Huckfeldt and Sprague, 1993: 281). Sprague refers to this condition as “social resonance” since the underlying intuition is “one of reinforcement of a property possessed by individual through repeatedly encountering the same property in the environment” (Sprague, 1982: 101). The sociological approach for measuring voting behavior uses socioeconomic variables like class, occupation, ethnicity, sex, and age for determining the support of electorates for political parties and candidates and finding correlations. The focus of this approach is on the correlations between the voters and the social settings, voting intentions in the social context, and examines the effects on the voting behavior of variables such as caste communities, socioeconomic class, language, religion, and rural–urban divides.
On the other hand, the discipline of political science computes voting behavior using political factors such as electoral issues, political programs, electoral campaigns, and the popularity of political parties and leaders based on the opinion and attitudes of the voters. The focus of political science enquiry in election studies has focused on three main areas: the structure and motivations of the electorate, the operation and effect of the party and the election system, and the impact of social and political institutions on voting behavior. Political theorists are concerned with understanding the political community and the political animal, and to understand them eventually by means of precise and general statements (Eldersveld, 1951). The measurement of voting behavior and attitudes by the political science discipline has not produced conclusions or patterns that can be theorized at the broad level but have been successful in explaining the political behavior of the electorates in definitive terms. Apart from these two common approaches, there are other methods of election studies like ecological or aggregate statistical approach and rational choice approaches for measuring voting behavior and attitudes. The ecological or aggregate statistical approach finds out the correlation of voting patterns and trends with the characteristic features of a geographical area like the ward or village panchayat, constituency, and the state.
The rational choice or the institutional context approach attempts to explain voting behavior as the outcome of a series of instrumental cost benefit calculations by the individual, assessing the relative desirability of specific electoral outcomes in terms of the issues addressed and policies espoused by the different parties or candidates. The institutional context refers to specific institutional structures, rules, and procedures that formally or informally define relationships among individuals and in turn influence individual behavior. The electoral rules governing the aggregation of votes, the method of representation, and the scope of the franchise have been found to directly and substantially influence the outcome of elections and the behavior and attitudes of individual voters (Johnson et al., 1999). Election studies following this approach measure the opinion and views of the electorate on different institutions and provide a straightforward explanation for how electoral rules and regulation influence the choices of individual voters and electoral outcomes. The outcome resulting from the game depends upon the set of feasible outcomes, individual preference, and the rules that govern the game (Plott, 1978). The rules are taken to be external to individual behavior and the level of measuring institutional rules is solely determined by the unit and level of analysis of the election research. The various social science approaches for measuring voting behavior and attitudes of the electorates have in recent times witnessed an interdisciplinary exchange of variables that were earlier considered exclusive and distinct for each approach. Thus variables like caste, community, religion, and socioeconomic class were earlier used only by the sociologists but these variables are now quite frequently used by political theorists in democratic countries for measuring the voting behavior and attitudes of the electorate.
Why We Measure Voting Behavior
Voting in elections is the most visible form of political participation in democratic countries and scholars and researchers all over the world try to measure the voting behavior and attitudes of the electorates. The overall purpose of election studies is to find out the voting patterns and trends based on the opinion and attitudes of the voters. The purpose of election studies is not only to present a narrative account of various events that take place during elections but also to scientifically identify and explain the recurring causal dynamics underlying the particular events of that election based on voters’ opinion and feedback. The data of voting process available with election bodies provided the impetus to the psephologists to collect further electoral data through opinion polls for measuring the voting behavior and attitudes of voters. The reasons for measuring voting behavior is manifold, but the main focus is to understand the voting patterns in elections, by probing key issues like why people vote or do not vote, how they arrive at voting decisions and questions connected with voters’ engagement and participation in the elections. The elections are studied and examined primarily through the prism of voters. What does and does not influence voters is ascertained by comparing the behavior and attitudes of one group of voters at a particular election with that of another group at the same election. It is assumed that if we can understand what accounts for differences between voters at an election, we can understand what accounts for the outcome and key characteristics of elections as a whole (Curtice, 2000).
One of the key purposes of election studies is to find the swing in elections which is the average gain of winning parties and the average loss by losing parties as expressed in terms of their percentages of all the votes cast at the aggregate and disaggregate levels. The swing of votes helps in explaining the election verdict in two ways: (a) the general measure of the degree of movement of popular electoral support in favor of the main winning parties and (b) in systematically measuring the relationship between a party's gain or loss in popular votes and its gain or loss in the number of seats won or lost. Sample surveys for measuring voting behavior over a span of time provide time series data of successive elections that are used in comparative analysis of voting behavior and attitudes and in revealing the changing electoral patterns and trends. Election studies have introduced time into their designs either by deploying a pre/post-poll design survey in which the same group of voters is interviewed both before and after the polling day or by an inter-election panel design in which voters interviewed at the last election are contacted again at the next one and interviewed (Curtice and Semetko, 1994; Miller and Shanks, 1996). While potentially panel design is subject to problems of conditioning and attrition, these panel designs also have the advantage that they reduce our reliance on the respondent's memory of past attitudes or behavior, thereby giving us, for example, more reliable estimates of the volatility of voting behavior (Himmelweit et al., 1978).
The purpose of measuring voting behavior and the aspects of elections probed in India is almost the same as it is in other countries of the world with some peculiarities that are specific to a country. Before we embark on the need for conducting survey-based election studies in India, it would be pertinent to find out what is the official election-related information and kind of data that is available and since when it is archived in the Election Commission of India (ECI). The Election Commission of India houses the election results and data of all general elections and state assembly elections held in India since independence. The data are in the public domain and the electronic copies of it are available on their official website. The kind of information available at ECI are: (a) the number of people who voted in Parliamentary or Assembly elections that is termed as Voter Turnout; (b) the list of candidates who contested the elections at the national/state level, the winner, the runner up, and the percentage of votes polled by all the candidates; (c) the number of political parties that contested the elections and the votes polled by them. It also provides the number of candidates fielded by parties and the number of candidates that won; (d) data on the gender break up of candidates who contested and won the elections. It also provides information about the scheduled castes (SC) and scheduled tribe (ST) status of candidates elected in a particular election and (e) it also archives the affidavits filed by the candidates who contest elections containing particulars like judicial cases filed against them, property held by them, and other personal information for public scrutiny.
The information available at ECI provides the factual information of voting processes in elections and the detailed aggregate results in quantitative terms. However, it does not provide any data about the voting behavior and attitudes of the electorates like how people from different socioeconomic and caste communities voted in the election, whom they voted for or did not vote for and why they voted for a particular party or candidate. Did the young voter have different political preferences compared to the old? Are most women voters guided by their husbands in taking their voting decisions? Which election issue dominated the mind of the voters during a particular election? There are numerous questions of such kind, which can't be answered from the results/data available from the ECI. The available information cannot answer questions related with elections like: Do Muslims in India vote for the right wing political party BJP or do they vote en bloc and strategically vote to defeat the party in elections? Forward castes are considered to be traditional supporters of national parties like Congress or BJP always vote for them or do they vote for regional parties also in some states? What have been the voting patterns of voters from communities like Dalits and Adivasis in India? Has the emergence of parties based on scheduled castes/tribal identities led to the consolidation of scheduled castes/tribal votes in their favor? What is the support base of political parties at the national level and in different states of India and what does their profile of voters look like? Do electoral choices amongst voters, from different background (educated/illiterates, rural/urban, and rich/poor) vary significantly? The study of behavioral or contextual aspects of voting in Indian elections becomes important and relevant as answers to these can be found in an evidenced manner by conducting empirical election studies. An attempt to answer these questions without any evidence would be conjectural or impressionistic and can be far removed from the actual truth.
The National Election Study series based on post-poll surveys conducted by the Lokniti, Programme for Comparative Democracy at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, is the largest and the most comprehensive social scientific survey of Indian General Elections and perhaps of any election in the world. The NES series not only is a study of voting behavior of the Indian electorate but also gathers the most robust information about how Indians voted in the various national elections. The NES treats elections as a window to capture the most accurate snapshot of the political behavior, attitudes, and opinion of the Indian voters. The last NES conducted in 2009 also explored the awareness levels and opinion of the Indian citizens on issues concerning the Indian economy, national security, democracy, and diversity. The National Election Study is the most comprehensive information database of social and political change in India and has been used as a source for international comparative studies. The purpose of conducting election surveys in India is to measure voting patterns and trends of the electorate, their electoral preferences and choices, issues that voters considered important, and the reasons for their participation or nonparticipation in elections. It helps in gathering detailed and comprehensive information about the behavioral aspects of voters in elections. Thus election surveys are much more than just finding out the vote share assessment of political parties and seat forecasting, as it is popularly perceived.