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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | For performers, incumbency helps by Poonam Gupta

For performers, incumbency helps by Poonam Gupta

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published Published on Apr 19, 2011   modified Modified on Apr 19, 2011

The 2009 Parliamentary election returned the Congress party to power with more seats than even the most optimistic predictions. From 145 seats in 2004, the Congress increased its tally to 206 seats. No doubt, the five-year UPA rule had been characterised by unprecedented growth, but this is too simplistic an explanation since the Congress’s performance varied widely across the states in the elections. For instance, it won just nine out of 72 seats in the states of Bihar, Orissa and Chhattisgarh. Despite the high growth they experienced, these states voted overwhelmingly against the Congress. Clearly, we need a more nuanced analysis to explain the election outcome.

In a recent paper, Economic Reforms and Elections Outcomes, Arvind Panagariya and I comprehensively analyse the data for 2009 general elections to undertake this task. Our explanation of the unexpected showing of the Congress consists of two steps. In the first step, we connect the victory of the Congress candidates to high-growth states in which it ruled. In the second step, we connect the good fortune of the Congress to its excellent showing in states that performed poorly economically and were ruled by its rival parties.

Our analysis focuses on the larger states that had stable governments between 2004 and 2009. We divide these states into low, medium and high growth states and first evaluate the role of incumbency in determining the election outcomes. We ask whether the effect of incumbency differed across states with different growth records. Our results show that the incumbency factor was most important at the state government level and it strongly depended on the growth record of the state governments. Whether or not voters voted for the candidates of the parties in power in their states depended on the economic growth obtained under the incumbent state government.

If a state government delivered growth higher than the national average, the voters overwhelmingly voted in favour of its candidates. If, on the other hand, the growth in a state lagged behind the average growth rate across states, the candidates of the party in power in the state were more prone to losing the election. Put another way, voters exhibited a strong pro-incumbency behaviour in high growth states and a neutral or anti-incumbency behaviour in low growth states.

Consistent with this finding, the Congress party did an encore in the fast growing states where it was in power at the time of elections. For example, in Haryana and Delhi, two of the fastest growing states, where the Congress was the incumbent party, it won most of the parliamentary seats, increasing its tally from 15 seats in 2004 to 16 seats in 2009 out of a total of 17 seats. But this factor by itself is not sufficient to explain the rise of the Congress’s tally from 145 in 2004 to 206 in 2009.

Where the Congress made even bigger gains was in the poorly performing states that were ruled by its rival parties. In the states of Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, where the Congress was in the opposition and the growth record of the incumbent state governments turned out to be poor, it made huge gains. As the table shows, these states yielded an advantage of 42 seats to the Congress! Indeed, the Congress’s ally Trinamool Congress (TMC) made similar gains in West Bengal, another slow growing state ruled by a rival party. TMC made a gigantic gain of 17 seats in that state, making it easier for the Congress to put together a coalition government. The Congress and its coalition partners together more or less maintained their 2004 positions in most of the medium growth states with one exception: they made a large gain of 13 seats in Kerala, which had experienced a growth rate close to the national average.

It is too early to say how various parties would fare in the 2014 general elections on the basis of the model. But what one can conclude from it is that the outcome will depend significantly on the growth record of the state economies under the incumbent state governments between 2009 and 2014. Our results also suggest that in future elections it would be too naïve to predict elections results based solely on the anti-incumbency factor, as done by some pundits. A more careful approach would combine the status of incumbency of various parties in state governments with their performance as incumbents.

There are at least two important questions our research has not addressed so far. First, our analysis has focused on growth as the determining factor. But it is possible that other factors such as the provision of infrastructure, delivery of public services, governance and the perceptions of the top leadership expected to emerge under alternative coalitions matter as well. We acknowledge that these issues are important, but to the extent that growth is more readily measured and is correlated with at least some of these other outcomes, our approach would seem to be defensible.

Second, if the state governments’ performance is poor and the voter looks for alternatives, what factors influence his or her voting behaviour? Specifically, precisely why did the Congress rather than other parties benefit so big in the states such as Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh in the 2009 election? Our preliminary analysis suggests that apart from responding to the observable qualities of the candidates, the voter also goes for the main opposition party in his or her state.

A last possible limitation of our work is that it is based exclusively on the 2009 general elections and thus the results possibly cannot be generalised to the assembly elections or to the past elections. These are the issues on which we hope to report in the future on the basis of our ongoing work!

The author is a professor at ICRIER

The Financial Express, 19 April, 2011, http://www.financialexpress.com/news/column-for-performers-incumbency-helps/777847/

Tagged with: Governance



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