As Karnataka goes to polls, it might be worth grappling with its complex electoral data. Such intriguing electoral dynamics are witnessed in some states of India. We present and explain two intriguing observations. First, parties face different results in Lok Sabha and Assembly elections as well. It means to say that the voters of Karnataka are sensitive whether they are voting in general elections or in assembly elections. For example, in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won about 64% of the state’s seats, but in the assembly elections held the same year, only 35%. In the 2008 assembly, it got 48% of the seats, but in the subsequent Lok Sabha, about 68% of Karnataka’s 28 seats. The next cycle was even more sharply divided. In the 2013 assembly, the BJP secured only 18% of the seats, which increased to 61% in the 2014 Lok Sabha (while the Congress party’s seat share decreased from 54% in the 2013 assembly to 32% in the 2014 Lok Sabha). ). And more recently, again, the BJP’s 46% seats in the 2018 assembly went to 89% of the state’s seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha (as Congress’s fell from 35% to 4%). At one level, this indicates that the BJP is the party of choice in Karnataka for the Lok Sabha, while not so much during assembly elections. This is not quite true, as we will discuss later.
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Second, Karnataka regularly sees an otherwise unusual pattern where the party with the overall votes often loses the seat count. While this is not impossible in a first-past-the-post election system, it is also not common, indicating a leak in the capture of the popular mandate. This has happened four times in the nine assembly elections held in (modern) Karnataka. Even in the other five elections the margin of vote share is not proportionately very high (compared to seat share). While this leakage indicates wastage of votes, it also indicates fierce electoral competition.
Why do elite voters in Karnataka aspire to different leadership in Delhi and Bengaluru, and why do popular-vote winners lose elections? The answer to these two puzzles can be found by looking closely at how states vote specifically for the Congress party.
Consider two charts published side by side. In the first, we show the seat and vote shares of the last four Lok Sabha and Assembly elections in the state. While the divergence in seats is significant, it vanishes when we look at vote share. This indicates that the election performance of Congress and BJP has not deviated significantly between central and state elections in terms of vote pull.
As far as vote preference is concerned, most accurately reflected in votes cast, it is clear that these two parties performed similarly in the two sets of elections; The only exception is the 2013 assembly. But this graph also shows something more interesting, which is that even in the Lok Sabha elections, the vote share of the Congress is not much less than that of the BJP. This means that the general perception that the voters of this state do not want the Congress to represent them in the Lok Sabha more than they do in the Vidhansabha needs to be revised. Congress is not really short of votes in the general and state election cycles.
We tested it in all the nine assembly elections. The second chart shows the difference in seats and votes between the Congress and its nearest rival, be it the BJP, the Janata Party or the Janata Dal (Secular). While a negative value indicates that the Congress figure was lower than that of the rival, more interestingly, the difference in vote share between the Congress and its nearest party is much less than the difference in seats. Note that six times this party lost seats (where the blue bar is below the x-axis), in four of them (1978, 2004, 2008, 2018), it received more votes than the seat winner (blue bar below). ) but brown bar above the x-axis). Also note that in all the six elections in which the Congress lost seat-wise, the margin of vote share was never more than 7%.
Somehow, it seems the voters cannot vote for the Congress in Karnataka. This could be some form of ‘Congress Complex’ of this state. The party definitely loses in the state, but it is not ruled out clearly.
The last five Lok Sabha elections point to a similar story. Despite losing badly in all these elections (except 1999), the Congress polled over 32% of the vote, only 2–4 percentage points less than the BJP in 2004, 2009 and 2014 (in 2018, it The difference was huge, though, 20%).
What all this means is that vote banks do not join together. This geographical spread of stronghold groups of each party often leads to coalition politics in Karnataka. Indeed, Karnataka is one of the most complex states to understand electoral politics.
Part of this complexity can be traced to its history. The current Indian state of Karnataka was formed in 1973 by merging the state of Mysore with parts of Hyderabad, Bombay and Coorg, each with a distinct identity and culture. During the elections from 1952 to 1972, the Congress party dominated the Mysore State Legislative Assembly, but as new territories were merged with it, the party began to lose its dominance, although it never declined. The Congress complex in Karnataka is also perhaps the party’s sore vein, which the BJP and JD(S) can identify with in regional patterns to work on.
Not only does Karnataka stand apart from other South Indian states in its broad political dynamics, but its electoral politics also exhibit patterns that are remarkably odd, as this analysis has shown.
Yugank Goyal and Arun Kumar Kaushik are teachers at FLAME University and OP Jindal Global University respectively and co-authored Who transferred my vote? Digging through Indian electoral data.
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