(iPoster) Welfare and the Pro-Incumbent Female Voter: Theory and Evidence from India

• In Event: Poster Session: Women, Gender, and Politics Research

Abstract

Indian elections increasingly show two clear trends, females turning out to vote in larger or equal numbers compared to males and a pronounced pro-incumbency bias in their votes (Tiwari 2025). Consider the eastern Indian state of Bihar, the empirical context of our study. Legislative Assembly Elections in the state – among India’s most populous and poorest – held in November 2025, saw a female turnout rate (71.6%) that was roughly 9 percentage-points higher than the male turnout rate (62.8%). Post-poll survey data reveals that this turnout difference also mapped onto greater support for the incumbent, with the incidence of female support (49.6%) for the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) being roughly 7 percentage-points higher than the incidence of male support (43.4%).

Extant research on gender, turnout, and vote choice, primarily focused on the United States and Western Europe, cannot explain these trends since the trajectory of female political participation in these contexts have been very different: changes in gender norms increased female voter turnout (Boix, Magyar and Munoz 2025), and as women’s autonomy and turnout increased, their vote choices changed from voting more conservatively to voting more progressively (Reyes-Householder and Schwindt-Bayer 2025). By contrast, gender norms in India have been “sticky” and female pro-incumbency bias has disproportionately favoured conservative incumbents (Aiyar and Sircar 2024).

What then explains these gender trends in Indian elections? To answer this question we foreground a third trend in these elections that has not received sufficient empirical or theoretical attention in the comparative politics literature, namely, in the instances where pro-incumbency bias has materialized, the incumbent had either inaugurated a new unconditional cash transfer scheme, specifically targeting women or groups of women, or increased the amount allocated to an existing scheme prior to the elections or promised the same after the elections. In the case of Bihar, the Dus Hazari (DH) scheme, granting 10,000 rupees to 7.5 million jeevika didis – female members of Self Help Groups in the state – was promulgated by the NDA only days before the Election Commission of India notified polling dates.

Drawing on a rich literature on the political economy of social policy, we argue that unconditional cash transfer schemes targeting females promised prior to or right after elections and growing female political participation in India are both manifestations of a new political “equilibrium.” The demand side of this equilibrium is constituted by India’s well-documented distress-driven employment growth trajectory (Ghatak, Jha, and Singh 2026), which has disproportionately impacted women, who have to balance the dual burdens of household work and low-quality employment. Under these circumstances, unconditional cash transfers may be preferable to structured cash transfer programs or even promises of employment – in Bihar, the opposition Mahagatbandhan alliance promised one government job per family – especially given low levels of trust in the ability of state institutions to implement more complex social policies (Grafstein 2005; Hirvonen, Schafer and Tukianen 2025). On the supply side, office-seeking political parties may also prefer a single large payment immediately before an election – that would allow for maximization of peak-end salience – to repeated credit-claiming opportunities built into more structured cash programs (De La O 2013; Galiani et al 2019).

To test our theoretical arguments, we turn to original panel survey data collected before and after the Bihar Assembly Elections in November 2025. Our dataset includes 9414 respondents who were randomly selected from tracker samples of 88300 respondents carried over the 52 weeks prior to the elections and were subsequently interviewed all over again after voting.

Our preliminary findings offer rough support for our theoretical framework. It is instructive to note, in particular, how female and male respondents in our post-poll survey answered a question that asked them “Which local issue or scheme has impacted the most?” The two issues that were reported most frequently were the DH scheme of the incumbent and the one-family-one-job scheme promised by the opposition alliance. Crucially, female respondents (28%) reported the DH scheme more frequently than male respondents (20%), and conversely, male respondents (40%) reported the one-family-one-job scheme more frequently than female respondents (35%).

To summarize, our proposed research aims to develop a new theoretical lens for thinking about the female voter outside of Global North contexts. By doing so, it connects rather organically to the theme of the 2026 APSA meeting, showing how democratic backsliding, at least in the context of the world’s largest democracy, coexists in a complicated relationship with growing female political participation.

Authors

• Subhasish Ray, Jindal School of Government and Public Policy, O. P. Jindal Global University

• Yashwant Deshmukh, CENTRE for VOTING OPINION & TRENDS in ELECTION RESEARCH (CVOTER)

• Unregistered Participant