There is an inescapable lure of nostalgia when reflecting on elections with someone who, over the last 40 years, has almost become a national habit as India tracked, dissected and predicted poll results. In doing all this, Prannoy Roy has worn his scholarship lightly in TV studios. No mean feat for a man who collaborated with legendary Oxford political scientist Sir David Butler and economist Ashok Lahiri way back in the 1980s for mainstreaming psephology in India.

Besides election broadcasting, it was on the pages of news magazine India Today and later in their book India Decides (1984) that Roy and his colleagues blended rigour with accessibility while analysing elections in India.

After four decades, he has chosen the printed word again to chronicle elements of change and continuity in India’s electoral scene and, more significantly, in the evolving ways of understanding polls.

Coming in a season of election books released in the run-up to the Lok Sabha polls, The Verdict: Decoding India’s Elections (Penguin Random House), co-authored with psephologist Dorab Sopariwala, stands out for its statistical insights into how India has been voting in the last seven decades and identifies some important landmarks in India’s electoral democracy.

Shunning ambition of scale, the book has preferred to be useful instead. While providing an informative peek into actual voting behaviour, the book is likely to be remembered as a primer on how the practice of spotting the trend—opinion polls, exit polls and surveys—works in India and its challenges.  

As expected, Roy and Sopariwala speak through data—some of which defy conventional poll wisdom, some reinforcing it, and some leaving teasers to stimulate further research. With four thematically organised parts of three chapters each, the book chooses to conclude with a fifth part on aspects to look out for in the forthcoming polls in light of the perspectives offered by the data informing a large part of the book.

It’s the first part that’s most important, digging into some less talked about trends emerging from all the 392 elections (376 Assembly and 16 Lok Sabha polls) held till January 2019. A significant point is the changing attitudes towards incumbency (pro well as anti) and the varying degrees of its relevance in voting patterns.

In their study, Roy and Sopariwala see its varying effects in three phases: the pro-incumbency era (1952-1977), the anti-incumbency era (1977-2002), and the fifty-fifty era (2002-2019). They studied the results of 235 state Assembly elections in big and medium-sized states over the last 67 years. What they found is the first phase (1952-77) was one of the “optimist voter”, with 82 per cent of governments being voted back to power. The second phase (1977-2002) was dominated by the “angry voter” with only 29 per cent of governments retaining power after polls. The third phase (2002-2019) has seen the “wiser voter” neutralising the role of incumbency with calmer scrutiny as 48 per cent of governments have been voted back to power.

This broad set of data from big and medium-sized states is followed by more detailed data about variations across states, its implications on voter behaviour in the Lok Sabha polls, and whether it works at the candidate level and the party level. With the benefit of hindsight and their own field experiences, the authors provide historical reasoning behind the shifting attitudes towards incumbency. They lace insight with relevant anecdotes—the one about the scale of “state capture” is particularly amusing. It recalls how in the heyday of All India Radio, a Cabinet minister once asked that the 9 pm news broadcast be delayed by five minutes and instead, a Bollywood number be played to entertain guests at a party he was hosting at home.

However, what many will find interesting, and significant too, are the figures regarding the turnout of women voters. The remarkable participatory shift it shows sets the stage for a gender reset in the poll campaigns and agendas of political parties. Taking 1962 as the base year (as it was the first election in which separate figures for men and women turnout was placed in public domain by the Election Commission), the authors note that in the last 56 years (1962-2018) of state Assembly polls, there has been a 27 per cent rise in women’s turnout—from 43 per cent in 1962 to 70 per cent in 2018. In the same period, men’s turnout rose by only 6 per cent, from 63 per cent in 1962 to 69 per cent in 2018).

The authors note that women’s turnout figures in Assembly polls in 2017-2018 was remarkable for the fact that “for the first time in India’s electoral history, women’s turnout was higher than that of men in state Assembly elections of 2017-2018”.  Even in the Lok Sabha polls held from 1962 to 2014, women’s turnout rose by 18.8 per cent, from 46.7 per cent in 1962 to 65.5 per cent in 2014, while the same period saw only 4.9 per cent increase in men’s turnout, from 62.1 per cent to 67 per cent. There are obviously inter-state differences in these trends, with some states showing a more impressive turnout of women voters than others.

Perhaps more interesting is the fact that this rise in women voters has been significantly shaped by rural women who have left urban women behind in turnout numbers. The book points out that if Lok Sabha turnout figures of 1971 and 2014 are compared, rural women’s turnout has risen from 53 per cent to 66 per cent—a 13 per cent increase—while urban women’s turnout actually declined by 1 per cent (from 61 per cent to 60 per cent). In fact, even rural men registered a 1 per cent rise in turnout between the 1971 and 2014 Lok Sabha polls (from 66 per cent to 67 per cent) while urban men turnout slipped from 65 per cent to 66 per cent.

Using their interactions with women voters in their surveys throughout different parts of the country, the authors say this rise in women voters, particularly rural women, isn’t just quantitative, but qualitative too. Contrary to perceptions that they are guided by male members about their voting preference, women voters asserted their independence while making their choice. “He may think that I listen to him about whom to vote for, that’s in his dreams; I vote for exactly whom I want to vote for”—that’s the most common response the authors received when they asked women voters if they voted for the party their husbands told them to vote for.

This finding is corroborated by a survey conducted in 2014 by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) which found that 70 per cent of women voters said they did not consult their husbands on whom to vote for.

The book would have benefited from an inquiry into the sociological reasoning behind the rise in women voter turnout. In particular, the possible impact of migration on the relative turnout figures of women as well as men would be interesting to look at. However, the book has left it for more detailed analysis by academic researchers in the future. However, that hasn’t prevented it from highlighting the concern about the growing number of women missing from the electoral rolls, despite efforts made by Election Commission through its multiple outreach programmes.

To put it in figures, based on 2011 Census figures (and projected to 2019), the number of women voters should be 97.2 per cent of the male electorate. In absolute numbers, it’s 451 million women voters. But, the Election Commission notes that there are only 430 million women voters (92.7 per cent of the male electorate). This implies that 21 million women voters haven’t been registered yet on the electoral rolls, a cumulative effect of non-registration over a number of years. While a number of social and cultural factors may be responsible for it, the authors insist on a sense of urgency in correcting this insidious problem.

With empirical research, the book highlights the ascendancy of local issues in voting patterns as well as rising participation in grass-roots electoral exercises. At the institutional level of the conduct of elections, Roy and Sopariwla firmly endorse the institutional integrity and efficiency of the Election Commission and, with deep satisfaction, compliment it for eliminating the scourge of booth-capturing. The authors cogently argue for the sanctity and tamper-proof authenticity of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) and counter any scepticism about its functioning as unscientific and unwarranted.

But it’s the chapters on the study of polls, the pollsters’ methods and craft that the authors get a peek into the ways and minds of the country’s most acclaimed psephologists. The chance to hear from the horse’s mouth is clearly the most tempting invitation to the book. The authors choose to make it an educational experience too: tracing the evolution of poll studies in India. Having its moorings in India in the late 1950s in the Eric PW Costa-headed Indian Institute of Public Opinion and later Rajni Kothari’s CSDS, election studies (and particularly psephology) graduated from being intermittent to regular only in the 1980s. It was also the time when it became mainstream with the advent of election broadcasting on state-run Doordarshan and expansion in print publications. Roy, being one of the protagonists of this shift in the coverage of elections, tells its story with engaging details.

It’s a journey that takes us to the origins of the terms which have now become part of routine poll analysis lexicon: swing (Butler), index of opposition unity (Roy and Lahiri) and anti-incumbency (Sopariwala). You get to know how Sir Butler’s famous uniform swing theory was adjusted to India’s heterogeneity by applying concepts like homogeneous zones in calculations. It also tells us how Roy and Ashok Lahiri came up with the definition of index of opposition unity and to enable more accurate assessments in multi-party elections as seen in India. The authors talk about the challenge of converting vote percentage into seats that confronts pollsters in India and why this flawed representative feature, in a built-in first-past-the-post system, accounts for some measure of inaccuracies in a number of opinion and exit polls.

With the explosion of genuine psephological and pseudo-psephological exercises in India’s ever-growing media landscape and on social media, the authors hint at how to gauge the credibility of various polls. Statistically speaking, they find that out of 833 such polls conducted since 1980 (386 opinion and 447 exit), 75 per cent of polls were correct in predicting the winner. The success rate of exit polls is higher at 84 per cent while for opinion polls, it was 71 per cent.

Taking both exit and opinion polls as an aggregate, they correctly predict the winner of 97 per cent of Lok Sabha polls while the figure is 75 per cent for state Assembly polls (the 2004 Lok Sabha polls was taken as an outlier in calculating these figures). The strike rate of such polls may not match the global standards of the polling industry, but they aren’t as off-the-mark as public perception would imagine.

Based on how accurately different polling and survey agencies got their results, the authors rank them—without naming them. It’s a first of its kind ranking. One wonders whether naming the agencies would have served the purpose better, rather than concealing their names behind the anonymity of alphabets.

There are parts of the book where the authors talk at length about different types of polls and surveys in India and why some are more trustworthy than others—the methodological challenges in getting the sample size large and diverse enough to represent various sections of voters. Besides the issue of methodology and rigour, they also highlight the issue of underestimation bias (the play-safe mode) on the part of pollsters which is underpinned by their need to correctly predict the winner even if not stating the exact scale of the win. The chance of getting the latter wrong incurs the danger of disrepute.

Interestingly, along with the pollsters’ play-safe approach, the exact seat prediction becomes difficult also because a sizeable number of respondents also prefer the play-safe approach in their replies to survey questions. In addition to underestimation bias, it would have been rewarding if the authors touched on the challenges that are rooted in underdog bias.

The book takes into account several variables in voting patterns, like turnout, and their effects on the performance of various parties. A case in point is how they analyse the ways in which turnout figure impacts the Bharatiya Janata Party and Congress differently, and the reasons for it. Considering that one of the authors started and heads one of India’s leading TV news organisations, it’s interesting that he talks about his finding that TV news consumption doesn’t have any significant effect on the voting behaviour of the Indian electorate. Similarly, the authors leave a number of pointers for keen students of the Indian elections to reflect on. That’s why, in an effort to drill in some statistical findings, some degree of repetition creeps in. It’s always a risk when a book’s purpose is educational in a textbook mould.

Three decades ago, in the 1989 edition of their work India Decides, Roy and his co-authors Ashok Lahiri and David Butler wrote: “Election forecasting is a fascinating game. Election analysis is a serious business. The pattern lies in these pages for those who have the patience to look for it … in the inchoate mass of Indian voting figures.” For those looking for clues for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Roy and his co-authors would perhaps say the same. This book, however, offers insight about what to make of the myriad clues that would be offered in the next few weeks, even as it retains seminality as a one-of-its-kind primer on the evolving strands in Indian psephology.

In his review of India Decides in 1989, S Nihal Singh wrote: “Unlike the steel mill, the television station, the national airline and the national news agency, psephology cannot be a badge of new nationhood … India is unique (in the third world) in elections held for the better part, in a free and fair atmosphere. The new vogue for public opinion polls is a sign of the times.” Thirty years later, what he saw as “new vogue” has become a regular adjunct to India’s electoral journey. The authors have offered a useful register for making sense of it in the elections of our times.