When Do the Poor Vote for the Right Wing and Why: Status Hierarchy and Vote Choice in the Indian States

Abstract

What explains the popularity of right-wing parties among the poor? This article argues that in hierarchical societies with high social-status inequality, cross-class coalitions can emerge among high-status voters if they believe their social status is under threat. I demonstrate this in the context of the Indian states by exploiting an announcement by the Government of India in 1990 to implement affirmative action for lower castes—an intervention that threatened to weaken the social status of upper caste Brahmans. Using unique data from the 1931 census, this article shows that areas where Brahmans were more dominant in the 1930s experienced a higher surge in right-wing voting after this announcement than other areas. Using survey data, I find that both wealthy and poor Brahmans voted for the right wing where Brahmans were dominant in 1931. The article shows how concerns about social status may make the poor open to appeals by antiredistribution parties.

A “Pink Tide” Then a “Turn to the Right”: Populisms and Extremism in Latin America in the Twenty-First Century

“…Nonetheless, the question of why the poor vote for the right is not new, albeit still complex, for academic researchers within social and political sciences (Frank 2007;Huber & Stanig 2009;Suryanarayan 2019;Galston 2018). The majority of studies highlight strategies of conservative political parties, as well as non-electoral means of the right to broaden its influence and increase its scope of political action (Domínguez 1997;Middlebrook 2000;Payne 2000;Eaton 2011;Luna & Kaltwasser 2014).…”

The Politics of Dignity: How Status Inequality shaped Redistributive Politics in India

“…There have been some remarkable exceptions in recent years (Cramer 2016;Suryanarayan 2018;Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen 2016;Mutz 2018). By focusing on the political behavior of high-statuspoor individuals, these studies are able to decouple status from other material endowments and hence convincingly demonstrate the independent effects of status on political and economic outcomes.…”

“…At the individual level, voters exposed to greater discrimination place a higher value on descriptive representation, even when such representation provides few material benefits (Malik 2019). The threat of losing social status, on the other hand, can even lead to members of dominant groups to vote against their material interests (Suryanarayan 2018;Mutz 2018).…”

“…Status inequality is not just a stronger predictor of redistribution than income inequality, it also affects the behavior of voters and political elites (Suryanarayan 2018;Mutz 2018;Chandra 2004;Malik 2019). spending, is also more comprehensive than existing studies.…”

“…NES surveys are based on random sampling immediately after state elections to capture voting patterns and gauge public opinion on a host of issues.5 Some researchers have used district-level estimates of the 1931 caste census, which was the last time that a caste census was carried out for which data is available (A Banerjee and Somanathan 2007;Suryanarayan 2018)…”