Does Higher Turnout Hurt Incumbents? An Analysis of State Elections in India

Date01 June 2018
DOI10.1177/2321023018762817
Published date01 June 2018
Subject MatterArticles
Article
Does Higher Turnout Hurt Incumbents?
An Analysis of State Elections in India
Milan Vaishnav1
Johnathan Guy2
Abstract
Conventional wisdom holds that an increase in voter turnout hurts incumbents in Indian elections. This
belief has become a central feature of how analysts discuss Indian voter behaviour. Yet there are few
systematic analyses of the relationship between turnout and incumbent performance. To fill this gap, we
analysed a dataset of elections in India’s 18 major states between 1980 and 2012. Our analyses show
that an increase in turnout, relative to the prior election, has no statistically meaningful relationship
with three measures of an incumbent government’s electoral performance. While the belief about the
anti-incumbent nature of rising turnout is widely held, it does not appear to be supported by the data.
Keywords
Elections, voter turnout, incumbency, India
There is a longstanding, widely held belief in India that a positive increase in voter turnout is inherently
anti-incumbent in nature. While the origins of this folk wisdom are indeterminate, statements in support
of this contention are repeated ad nauseam nearly every election cycle. Proponents of this view argue
that positive turnout growth—that is, an increase in voter turnout in the current election relative to the
previous election—signals that the electorate is in a mood for change and, hence, the electoral fortunes
of the incumbent government will be adversely affected.3 For instance, when discussing the growth in
voter turnout in India’s May 2014 general election relative to the previous election in 2009, economist
Surjit Bhalla claimed that ‘such a phenomena [sic] always goes against the incumbent. It is, if you will,
bad news for the incumbent’ (Firstpost, 2014). After the 2016 state elections in Tamil Nadu, one election
analyst proclaimed that ‘It is true that a huge voter turnout actually indicates an anti-incumbency wave.
People turn up in huge numbers to vote out the government’ (Naig, 2016).
Given the widespread belief in a close connection between increasing voter turnout and anti-
incumbency sentiment, it is surprising that there have been few (if any) systematic analyses of this
1 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC, USA.
2 University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
3 When it comes to the conventional wisdom, it is not clear whether rising turnout is thought to be anti-incumbent or pro-challenger.
There is a subtle difference between the two mechanisms.
Studies in Indian Politics
6(1) 71–87
© 2018 Lokniti, Centre for the
Study of Developing Societies
SAGE Publications
sagepub.in/home.nav
DOI: 10.1177/2321023018762817
http://journals.sagepub.com/home/inp
Corresponding author:
Milan Vaishnav, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1779 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC
20036, USA.
E-mail: mvaishnav@ceip.org
72 Studies in Indian Politics 6(1)
relationship in the Indian context. Indeed, aside from the occasional newspaper opinion piece, we strug-
gled to locate even one empirical analysis of the statistical relationship between turnout and incumbency
in a scholarly publication. While in-depth analyses may be lacking, many experts have nevertheless
begun to cast doubt on the conventional narrative in recent years. One of India’s leading election experts,
Sanjay Kumar, told The Hindu (Shrinivasan, 2014) newspaper ‘I don’t know how this idea that high
turnout is associated with anti-incumbency has persisted from generation to generation. The relationship
has never existed.’ Some have even argued in favour of the opposite relationship—that is, that a spike in
voter turnout is ‘pro-incumbent’. In 2012, the then-Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, attributed
an increase in state voter turnout to a surge of support in favour of his incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP) government. ‘This is the record polling after the formation of the state. We have a popular term in
anti-incumbency but after this state election, political pundits will have to adapt and discuss the term
pro-incumbency,’ Modi said (Press Trust of India, 2012).
Drawing on recent electoral history, one can find examples linking a sharp rise in voter turnout
to incumbent defeats as well as victories. Consider two elections: the 2010 assembly elections in Bihar
and the 2011 assembly polls in Tamil Nadu. In Bihar, voter turnout grew by 6.8 percentage points
between 2005 and 2010, part of an underlying trend of rising voter participation in the north Indian state.
Notwithstanding this increase in turnout, the incumbent National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition
headed by Nitish Kumar won a rousing re-election. The coalition grew its vote share by 3 per cent and
increased its share of seats in the Bihar assembly by nearly 26 per cent. Contrast this with Tamil Nadu’s
2011 polls which saw a 7.2 percentage point increase in voter turnout over 2006. In this case, rising
voter turnout coincided with an incumbent loss. In the 2011 election, the ruling Dravida Munnetra
Kazhagam (DMK) alliance suffered a sharp defeat at the hands of its arch-rival All India Anna Dravida
Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), losing 3 per cent vote share and more than 43 per cent of its seat share.
In the prior 2006 poll, which also saw a large increase in turnout, the incumbent AIADMK suffered a
similar fate.
The present article scrutinizes the link between turnout and electoral outcomes by drawing on a data-
set of 128 elections held across 18 major states of India between 1980 and 2012. For each state election
in our dataset, we utilize data on three electoral outcomes: a binary measure of whether the incumbent
party or coalition was re-elected, the change in the incumbent’s vote share, and the change in the incum-
bent’s seat share. We then explore how well changes in turnout (from one state election to the next)
explain variation in these three outcomes. Our unit of analysis is a state election; we choose to concen-
trate at this level in order to capture the fortunes of a given incumbent party overall rather than those of
individual candidates. This focus on parties more directly tests the conventional wisdom, which refers to
aggregate turnout in a state and makes predictions about incumbent electoral performance on this basis.
To preview our results, our analyses find little empirical support for the hypothesized association
between increases in turnout and anti-incumbent electoral outcomes. Even after controlling for unob-
served time and state-level variation and a host of possible confounding factors, we find that an increase
in relative turnout has no statistically significant association with three discrete measures of incumbent
performance. We conclude from this exercise that, contrary to claims put forward by analysts, politi-
cians, and political pundits, a positive ‘turnout shock’ is not inherently pro- or anti-incumbent.
The remainder of this article is organized as follows. In the next section, we review the extant literature
on the subject, including the analyses that employ data from the Indian case. In the third section, we pre-
sent our empirical model and briefly describe the data used in our analysis. The fourth section contains our
findings, beginning with descriptive statistics and moving onto more systematic, multivariate analyses.
We conclude by suggesting several interesting research questions on turnout and incumbent performance
that have yet to be thoroughly explored.

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