The first two phases of the Lok Sabha polls recorded a relative dip in voter turnout figures which, understandably, has led poll watchers to read between the lines for clues as to why.

Pending final figures from the Election Commission, the available data for the first two phases indicate a dip from the 2019 polls. During the second phase last Friday, which covered 88 constituencies, 66.7 percent of voters cast their vote – almost three percent less than the 69.64 percent registered in 83 of these seats in 2019. This does not include five newly delimited constituencies in Assam.

In phase one, the turnout in 102 seats was 65.5 percent. In 2019 – where some seats were different and phase one covered only 91 seats – the turnout was almost 4.5 percentage points higher at 70 percent. The overall voter turnout in 2019 was a record-setting 67 percent, and the remaining five phases this year will show whether the 2024 figures can catch up.

Compared to turnouts in other democracies in the world, the turnout in the first two phases isn’t dull. But a slew of factors – ranging from heat wave to voter apathy to even electoral fatigue – have been cited for fewer voters going out to vote. The causes will continue to be of interest for their underlying sociopolitical reasoning, attitudinal dynamics, and even geographical factors. Perhaps a more focused study once the polls are over would be more helpful in examining them.

But the more immediate and teasing question for poll analysts is how the turnout will influence the chances of the BJP-led NDA or the Congress-led INDIA – the two principal alliances in the fray. This is also seen in the backdrop of the high turnout for 2019 coinciding with a big win for the BJP and its allies. But has that been a consistent trend over the last few elections to infer an indicator over a longer time arc?

In India, political analysts and psephologists have grappled with this question, of any relationship between turnout and performance. One such study is possibly relevant. Prannoy Roy and Dora Sopariwala’s book The Verdict, which came out in 2019, dwelt on this question with a rider that their research didn’t establish a definite causal relationship between high turnout and a party winning or losing. This was obviously to caution against looking for a wave, anti-incumbency signalling, or other signs purely on the basis of turnout numbers. But the authors still tried to look at the numbers to derive a tentative sense of how the turnout affected the two key alliances.

Roy and Sopariwala analysed data from three Lok Sabha polls between 2004 and 2014. They took 60 percent as a high turnout mark for the purpose of definition, and excluded states where both the BJP and its allies and the Congress and its allies were weak. This was to ensure a clearer sense of looking only at constituencies where these parties were in real contest. 

Moreover, besides a mix of urban-rural constituencies, the book looked at rural constituencies exclusively to neutralise the impact of the urban-rural divide. This was to offset the possibility that the BJP’s strongholds in urban constituencies might affect the overall correlation with turnout in all constituencies. However, the data indicated no such divergence, and the authors noted some interesting trends.

One was that the BJP-led alliance performed better in low-turnout constituencies in 2004, 2009 and 2014. The Congress-led alliance either chipped away the margin of victory or even got ahead in high-turnout constituencies.

“In each one of three consecutive elections, the BJP+ performed much better in constituencies which had a low turnout. The BJP+’s margins of victory dropped, and in some cases ‘lost’ to the Congress+ (ie, which psephologists prefer to describe as a negative margin) in high-turnout seats, while the positions were reversed with the BJP+ regaining a positive margin over the Congress+ in low-turnout seats. The overall average results are unambiguous in constituencies with high as well as low turnout. Where the turnout is low, the BJP+ has a very high 10 percent margin of votes over the Congress+. In constituencies where the turnout is high, the average BJP+ margin over the Congress+ (UPA) drops to only 2 per cent, which indicates a significant impact of turnout on the BJP+’s victory margins,” the book observed. 

The authors suggested that the low turnout favouring the NDA could have been due to the nature of cadre-based organisations like the BJP. The BJP’s strong organisation, aided by the RSS network of workers, helps in ensuring that most of their committed voters reach the polling booth. It’s a feature of all cadre-based parties, the Left as well as the BJP, that they can be more effective in mobilising the votes of their supporters on voting day. 

On the contrary, parties with a weaker organisation – like the Congress in the last two decades, or parties with relatively thinner presence of dedicated workers – rely mostly on the “spontaneous and self-motivated” efforts of their core voters. So in a low turnout situation, they tend to underperform as the workers show limited capacity to bring supporters to the booth.

But there is an important exception to be seen and placed in the context of the nature of different polls, particularly the nature of issues and its effect on mobilisation. For instance, it is seen that chances of a spontaneous turnout are greater in polls contested over key issues of the day, or emotive ones that impel core voter groups of parties to turn up. Parties with weaker organisation might find such propellants of high turnout favourable for their chances. 

But how then can one explain the high turnout in 2019 that resulted in a big win for the BJP and its allies? Perhaps the answer is an incremental factor that could be deduced in the above reasoning. The combination of cadre-based mobilisation and spontaneous voting perhaps presented a mix that delivered big electoral returns for the BJP-led NDA.

This analysis, however, doesn’t fit in neatly with what a stream of election commentary is trying to infer from the low turnout figures in the first two phases this year. An editorial in The Hindu, for example, said: “Considering the fact that the BJP won a comfortable majority and its highest vote share in 2019 coinciding with the higher voter turnout, a lower turnout could be a sign of worry for it, even if, conventionally, a higher turnout has generally been a message about anti-incumbency in earlier polls before the BJP became the pole of the Indian party system.”

This line of commentary implies two key things. First, the two phases might not have provided the BJP with the incremental push of self-motivated voting seen in higher turnout that could add to its cadre-based advantage in low-turnout scenarios. Second, any inference about anti-incumbency messaging in higher-turnout scenarios no longer holds water in the current phase of BJP’s pivotal presence in India’s party structure – a new normal about which inferences on turnouts-results are even more difficult than before.

In the days to come, there could be more efforts at establishing a correlation between turnout figures and possible poll outcomes, though sticking out one’s neck to derive a conclusion could be fraught with the peril of reading too much in a shifting variant. 

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