Economic Performance and Electoral Volatility: Testing the Economic Voting Hypothesis on Indian States, 1957–2013

Bharatee Dash and J. Stephen Ferris

No 18-07, Carleton Economic Papers from Carleton University, Department of Economics

Abstract: The electoral consequences of variations in economic growth on vote volatility are analyzed on a panel of fourteen Indian states between 1957 and 2013. Two measures of volatility are used: first changes in party vote shares at the assembly level and the state average of volatilities constructed at the constituency level. While the results suggest that both volatilities are reduced by higher income growth rates, volatility at the constituency level is found to be somewhat more sensitive to growth rates. Examination of the periodicity of income growth’s impact finds that the growth rate in the final year of governance has a stronger effect on volatility than does the average income growth rate arising over the entire election cycle. We also find that vote switching responds more to negative rather than positive growth changes and, by decomposing volatility, find that growth changes affect internal vote shifting more than between established parties and new comers. More generally the responsiveness of volatility to set of economic and political characteristics of the state suggests that theories of economic voting have an important role to play in understanding electoral outcomes and hence the process of development

Keywords: Vote volatility; Economic voting; Indian States; Political business cycle; growth asymmetries (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 O11 O43 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2018-06-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-dev and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published: Carleton Economic Papers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.carleton.ca/economics/wp-content/uploads/cep18-07.pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:car:carecp:18-07

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Carleton Economic Papers from Carleton University, Department of Economics C870 Loeb Building, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa Ontario, K1S 5B6 Canada.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Court Lindsay ().