Media Exposure and Vote Choice in India, 1996–2019
| Published date | 01 December 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/23210230231203795 |
| Author | Shreyas Sardesai |
| Date | 01 December 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Special Section: The Indian Voter |
Media Exposure and Vote Choice
in India, 1996–2019
Shreyas Sardesai1
Abstract
This article examines the relationship between media consumption and voting choices in India in the
context of increasing exposure to media, both traditional and new. Using media exposure-related data
from the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies’ (CSDS) national election surveys since 1996,
it makes a few key assertions. Historically, there has been a positive relationship between traditional
news media exposure and voting for the BJP, i.e., the greater the voters’ TV and newspaper consump-
tion, the higher their support for the BJP. With respect to the Congress party, the tendency has gen-
erally been the opposite. This pattern now extends to social media exposure as well. However, this
impact of media exposure on voting preferences that’s visible at the broad level weakens considerably
when slicing the data further by socio-demographic factors. It has been found that the trend of the
BJP’s vote share rising with increasing exposure to media is not consistent across the categories of age,
education, and caste during many elections. If there is one election, however, that bucked this trend, it
was the 2014 Lok Sabha election. The article argues that the BJP was successful in recognizing this and
capitalized on it through an extensive media and communications campaign in 2014.
Keywords
Media exposure, social media, traditional news media, vote choice, voting behaviour
Introduction
Up until the ‘much more substantially mediatized’ Lok Sabha election of 2014 (Palshikar, 2014) that saw
the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) capture power in Delhi, there was not much serious
analysis in India of the relationship between the level of exposure of voters to mass media and their vot-
ing behaviour. While social scientists in the West had debated the issue in great detail for decades
(DellaVigna & Kaplan, 2007; Iyengar & Kinder, 1987; Klapper, 1960; Lazarsfeld & Katz, 1955;
Original Article
Studies in Indian Politics
11(2) 317–334, 2023
© 2023 Lokniti, Centre for the
Study of Developing Societies
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/23210230231203795
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1 Lokniti-CSDS, Delhi, India
Corresponding author:
Shreyas Sardesai, Lokniti-CSDS, Delhi 110054, India.
E-mail: shreyas.sardesai@gmail.com
318 Studies in Indian Politics 11(2)
Lazarsfeld et al., 1944; McCombs & Shaw, 1972), hardly any study on Indian elections had linked the
regularity of voters’ engagement with various media sources to the way they had voted in an election.
This was despite the fact that politics and elections were gradually becoming more ‘mediated’, first with
the rapid growth of private TV news channels in the country after the de-regulation of news broadcasting
in 2000, and then with the penetration of the Internet.
The first systematic attempt at addressing this research gap was made by Verma and Sardesai
(2014)2 soon after the 2014 elections. Utilizing the media exposure-related data from the Centre for
the Study of Developing Societies’ (CSDS) National Election Studies (NES) conducted since 1996,
the authors sought to examine the effect of media exposure on Indian elections and found that ‘exposure
to the media was positively correlated to the likelihood of voting for the BJP’ (pp. 87) and that this was
not just the case in 2014 but in national elections preceding it as well. They argued that the foremost
reason for this correlation was that ‘the BJP’s traditional voter base – urban, upper caste, more educated
and wealthy – is more exposed to the media than those of its counterparts’ (pp. 86). This article
re-visits some of these arguments made by Verma and Sardesai by employing slightly different
methods and strategies on the same NES data sets. It also showcases the latest NES numbers from the
2019 elections to highlight continuities and changes.
With the help of the time-series data, the article will explore four issues. First, it will highlight the
penetration of traditional media, namely television, newspapers and radio, in India over the past two
decades. Second, it will examine voting choices of Indian voters over the years based on their exposure
to these traditional media, aiming to locate trends and patterns. Third, it will delve into the 2014 elections,
exploring the factors that contributed to its highly mediatized nature and made it distinctive vis-à-vis
elections before (1996, 1999, 2004 and 2009)3 and after it (2019). Finally, the article will shift focus to
Internet and social media to share the patterns of voting behaviour emerging among those exposed to
these new media platforms. Concluding remarks will summarize the findings and propose newer
approaches for future studies on media’s impact on voting behaviour in India.
Media Penetration over the Years
Official data and election studies conducted over the past two decades indicate that Indian voters have
become more and more exposed to the news media such as TV news channels, newspapers and the radio,
even though lately there has been a slight stagnation of these mediums with increasing usage of the
Internet. An analysis of the data from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and other reliable
sources highlights the remarkable growth of newspapers and news channels in India during the last
20 years. The number of daily newspapers in the country skyrocketed from 4,453 in 1996 to 17,160 in
2018, a fourfold increase (Table C1). Furthermore, the circulation of these dailies witnessed an even
more significant surge soaring from 4 crore copies per publishing day in 1996 to a staggering 24 crore in
2018. In fact, in terms of circulation, India is said to be the world’s second-largest newspaper market,
trailing only China (Khandekar, 2010), and it is estimated that one in five daily newspapers published
worldwide, originates from India (Vaidyanathan, 2011).
2 The author of this paper was a co-author of the Verma and Sardesai (2014) paper.
3 The 1998 NES data set has not been included for analysis since questions on media consumption in NES 1998 were not asked
with similar wording as in other NES rounds.
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