Does Haryana really show that voters vote differently in state and national elections?

What was meant to be boring one sided-match has suddenly come alive with the Bharatiya Janata Party unexpectedly faltering as it faced Assembly election in the states of Maharashtra and Haryana.

While the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance in Maharashtra is all set to retain power, the combine is set to lose a substantial number of seats compared to its 2014 tally. Haryana, on the other hand, has delivered a result few predicted: a hung house. The BJP won 40 seats in the state assembly, six less than the majority. However, what is really illustrative is just how much the BJP’s vote share dropped in the state since the Lok Sabha elections just five months back.

While the BJP had a vote share of 58.2% in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in Haryana, in the October Assembly elections, this plummeted to just 36.2%. That’s a drop of 22 percentage points in just five months.

Does this show, as many commentators have pointed, that the Indian voter is now increasingly differentiating between state and national elections?

Well, it’s more complicated than that.

For one, historically when elections are held simultaneously, the voter has tended to vote mostly the same way for both the Assembly and the Union parliament. A study by the public-policy think tank IDFC Institute crunched the numbers for four Lok Sabha elections – 1999, 2004, 2009 and 2014. The data analysis shows that “on average, there is a 77% chance that the Indian voter will vote for the same party for both the state and Centre when elections are held simultaneously,” a trend that the study calls an “undesirable impact on voter behaviour”.

This inference is backed by another study by Jagdeep Chhokar, a former professor, dean, and director in-charge of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and Sanjay Kumar, director of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. Chhokar and Kumar analysed 31 instances of simultaneous state and Lok Sabha elections since 1989. The result: “In 24 of those elections the major political parties polled almost a similar proportion of votes both for the Assembly and the Lok Sabha, while only in seven instances was the choice of voters somewhat different.”

Post 2014

Scroll.in went through the data from 10 large states and the BJP’s performance in them in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections as well as the Assembly election right after that.

We firstly find that Haryana in 2019 is a definite outlier. No state sees a drop like in Haryana from the 2019 Lok Sabha and the next Assembly elections.

What we do notice, however, is that the BJP has consistently done better in the 2014 Lok Sabha election than it did in the next Assembly election.

A provisional conclusion we can draw from the data is that the magnitude of difference when it comes to Haryana between Lok Sabha and Assembly elections is certainly not the norm. Voter preferences between 2014 and 2019 at the state and national level usually tend to coincide a lot more than what Haryana has shown from May to October.

However, there is still a difference between state and national. It seems that since 2014, the BJP performs significantly better in national polls than in state elections. Could this have to do with the party’s reliance on the image and symbolism of Modi which clearly overshadows the work of the party organisation?