Populist Appeals and Party Support in Bihar

• In Event: Diverse India 2019: Populism, Campaigning & Influence

Abstract

Bihar’s 2015 Assembly election delivered the first defeat to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) after the party’s landslide election in the 2014 Lok Sabha. We utilize on our two-wave pre-post election panel study in Bihar in 2019, [n=2,400] to identify the importance of information, issues, party leaders and perceptions of party alliances, in comparison with caste and religion and other demographic variables, in predicting party support in the Lok Sabha election. We first compare key variables in the 2019 model with our 2015 model of party support to discuss stability and change in one of India’s poorest states (Kumar et al. 2018).

We conducted a large cross-sectional survey fielded during the 2015 election campaign and developed a model predicting party support for each of the four large political parties that captured the majority of votes in the 2015 election in Bihar. Based on a review of the literature, issue salience including communalism and caste-ism which, among other issues, could be said to be “owned” by different opposing parties (Walgrave, Tresch & Lefevere 2015), evaluations of government performance (Nooruddin & Chhibber 2007), evaluations of political leaders (Bean & Mughan 1989; Andersen & Evans 2003; Aarts, Blais & Schmitt 2011; Stevens, Karp & Hodgson 2011), attention to media and political advertising such as posters or handbills (Neyazi, Kumar & Semetko 2016), along with demographic variables including caste, religion, gender among others (Chandra 2004, 2009; Heath 2005; Jaffrelot 2010), are in the model. The findings of that study, based on 2015 data, support our hypotheses on the value of different types of populist appeals for party support, and the importance of popular leaders in predicting party support. We are interested in how the emergence of low cost smartphones and data plans after the 2015 Bihar election has impacted the use of social and mobile media in 2019. Our study will help to explain how technological development may have influenced the dynamics of populist appeals and voting behavior in the 2019 election in Bihar, which already in 2018 had agreed upon electoral alliances.

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Authors

• Taberez A. Neyazi, National University of Singapore

• Kazuya Nakamizo, Kyoto University

• Anup Kumar, Cleveland State University

• Holli A. Semetko, Emory University