Voter behaviour at Jewargi assembly constituency in 2008 assembly: 2009 parliament and 2013 assembly election

Abstract

India is a very much diversified country. It is the largest democracy in the world. There are six National Parties in India as well as 48 State Parties in India. They participate in the democracy and voters of the individual constituency cast their vote to elect their representative. It is often found that voters change their choice of representative in India from time to time. Efforts are made to understand the choice of voter behaviour in India. Lokniti/CSDS is the pioneer in the Indian context to understand the voter behaviour. There are many other organizations also who perform opinion poll and exit poll to understand the choice of the voters. All these organizations conduct survey as the tool for data collection. They decide the sampling procedures, sample size, preparing the questionnaires and after conducting the surveys- analyse the information to reach a conclusion. All the different organizations are having the different ways to decide the sample size, sampling procedures and analysis of information gathered. The finding of all these types of studies reveal that there is a preference voting observed based up on caste/religion. There are some limitations in the survey methodology. It is not possible to analyse the past behaviour of the voters from the present time frame. And the findings of different agencies sometimes vary a lot based upon the size of sample, sampling procedures etc. The paper tries based on actual aggregated vote data if there is any caste/religion wise preference towards any political parties in different major elections. This paper also tries to find out the swing voters in different election and a probable analysis of the rationale behind it. The assembly constituency of Jewargi is chosen for this analysis purpose. Jewargi is a rural assembly constituency of Gulbarga District. The major castes of Jewargi are Lingyat, Kurba,Koli samaj, Muslim,SC and ST. In this paper 51 polling booths sample is taken of Jewargi (23% of the total booths). In this paper it is analysed whether a strong caste base 5 voting was observed in 2008 assembly,2009 parliament and 2013 assembly elections at Jewargi or not. It is also analysed which section of the voters showed a tendency to change the voting preference at Jewragi from election to election. The caste equation of all the sampled pooling booths are arrived by determining the individual caste of all the voters(total 36935 voters) enlisted during 2009 Parliament election. The election results of all these polling booths in 2008 assembly,2009 parliament and 2013 assembly election is correlated across the major castes/religion of the polling booths individually. The correlation values directly provides whether any caste wise preference voting is happening or not at Jewargi in that particular election. Again the comparative analysis of all these correlation coefficient in 2008 assembly, 2009 parliament and 2013 assembly election provides a fair idea regarding who are swing voters pertaining to caste/religion- who showed a tendency to change their loyality for political parties in different elections.