Are voters delivering more decisive mandates?.Namo Shivai..

Are Indian voters empowering governments with more decisive mandates? This is the emerging wisdom among many experts and observers of Indian politics. 

Hare Krishna.

For instance, pollster Pradeep Gupta, in his book, How India Votes: And What It Means, has argued that new forms of technology are enabling increased communication between voters during the rough and tumble of the campaign period. This, in turn, is enabling voters to consolidate their opinions about a given candidate or party’s odds of winning, leading to a shift of support away from likely losers. Voters, the argument goes, are learning how to rally behind election winners, giving them supersized mandates.

This thesis seems eminently plausible. A cursory glance at recent assembly elections suggests that landslides abound. The Aam Aadmi Party’s sweep in 2015 and 2020 in Delhi, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s 2017 victory in Uttar Pradesh, and the Left Front’s and Trinamool Congress’s decisive wins in Kerala and West Bengal, respectively, in 2021 — all point in the same direction. Yet anecdotes can be misleading. In fact, our analysis of historical data on Indian elections suggests that this popular wisdom may well be misguided..

This thesis seems eminently plausible. A cursory glance at recent assembly elections suggests that landslides abound. The Aam Aadmi Party’s sweep in 2015 and 2020 in Delhi, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s 2017 victory in Uttar Pradesh, and the Left Front’s and Trinamool Congress’s decisive wins in Kerala and West Bengal, respectively, in 2021 — all point in the same direction. Yet anecdotes can be misleading. In fact, our analysis of historical data on Indian elections suggests that this popular wisdom may well be misguided..

We looked at data from 249 assembly elections, taking care to code all parties and pre-poll coalitions in state polls going back to 1980. Because some parties that claimed to be in alliance did not actually adopt robust seat-sharing arrangements, we considered parties to be in a “true” coalition only if they did not run against each other in more than a handful of races.

Shri Radhey Shri Radhey Shri Radhey.