The Delhi Legislative Assembly
Elections, 2015 resulted in huge upsets for both BJP and Congress who
could only win 3 and 0 seats respectively, whereas the AAP won the
remaining 67 seats. This landslide
victory for Aam Aadmi Party was already on the cards even though a
majority of voters did not consider them as the most deserving
contestant. This post explains why a large number of voters did not
vote for their favourite party but for their second favourite.
Before the arrival of AAP, Delhi had
two major parties – BJP and Congress. And for a vast majority of
voters, all other parties or candidates were not the top ranked, so
how voters ranked them did not matter in deciding the election
result. There could be only two types of voters – BJP supporters
and Congress supporters. The introduction of AAP expanded the set to
six possible voter types:
Here's my interpretation of types. Type
1 voters support Congress and oppose the Hindutva forces of BJP.
These comprise a majority of Congress supporters. Type 2 support BJP
but would prefer a change of party due to opposition to Congress
because of corruption in previous years. Type 3 are the ones who do not want congress to win at any cost but would give chance to a new party and type 4 are AAP supporters who oppose Hindutva forces of BJP. Type 5 and 6 supported their respective parties but believe
that AAP as a new party will not be able to manage the Indian
capital.
In the 2013 Delhi elections, the number
of BJP (33% votes, 31 seats) supporters exceeded both AAP (29.5%
votes, 28 seats) and Congress (24.5% votes, 8 seats). Also,
independent candidates received 10% of total votes cast with 1 seat.
Once Arvind Kejriwal resigned as the Chief Minister of Delhi, it was
clear that Congress is not going to win any significant number of
seats in the 2015 re-elections and here is why AAP victory was a near
certainty in the following elections.
Since the type 1 voters did not want
BJP to win at any cost, they indulged in strategic behaviour and
voted for their second favourites AAP instead of Congress (who were
doomed to lose). If they had not done this, then BJP would have won
more seats and that would have been a worse result for them. Most of
the people who supported independent candidates were more likely to
support AAP over BJP as they are more likely to give chance to a new
party instead of the old established ones. So most of them also voted
in favour of AAP candidates to prevent the victory of BJP as they got
to know that the independent candidate is unlikely to win over AAP
candidate. So the outcome of 2015 elections did not represent the
actual support for AAP, but instead strategic voting by groups
of congress supporters and independent candidate supporting voters who considered
AAP the second best party.
The 2013 election result showed the
true preferences of voters as they were largely unaware of the likely
outcome and various opinion polls showed widely varying estimates of
number of seats for each party. This lack of information reduced the
scope for strategic behaviour. Also, since only a very short time
passed between 2013 and 2015 elections and there was not much change
in the political environment of Delhi, preferences can be taken to be
almost constant. The voter turnout increased only marginally from 66%
to 67% between the two. So, the set of voters was nearly identical
across the two elections. Out of the total votes caste in 2015
elections, AAP secured 54.8% votes, BJP 32.3% votes, whereas Congress
could garner only 9.7% of total votes cast. The votes cast in favour
of independent candidates reduced to just 0.5%. This increase of
votes in favour of AAP by 24.8% of voters is explained almost
entirely by the sum of decline in Congress votes by 14.8% and
independent votes by 9.5% compared to the 2013 elections. Based on
this we can say that type 1 voters comprise roughly 14.8% of the
voters whereas type 5 (or those congress supporters who did not
indulge in such strategic behaviour) were roughly 9.7%.
Many people blame introduction of Kiran
Bedi as BJP's Chief Minister candidate instead of Dr. Harsh Vardhan
for their defeat. But a single glance at the election data will give
her some relief as BJP's vote share in 2015 elections remained almost
the same as 2013 elections, registering only an insignificant fall of
0.7%. Often we only look at the outcome, oblivious to the
misrepresentations that keep happening in the background.This was one of those cases when Arvind Kejriwal was lucky to get more support than actually existed for him.
