Does Higher Turnout Hurt Incumbents? An Analysis of State Elections in India

Abstract

Conventional wisdom holds that an increase in voter turnout hurts incumbents in Indian elections. This belief has become a central feature of how analysts discuss Indian voter behaviour. Yet there are few systematic analyses of the relationship between turnout and incumbent performance. To fill this gap, we analysed a dataset of elections in India’s 18 major states between 1980 and 2012. Our analyses show that an increase in turnout, relative to the prior election, has no statistically meaningful relationship with three measures of an incumbent government’s electoral performance. While the belief about the anti-incumbent nature of rising turnout is widely held, it does not appear to be supported by the data.