The Development of Voting Behaviour Studies in India

Every general election produces a flood of numbers, surveys, and predictions about who voted for whom and why. Yet the systematic study of how people actually vote is a fairly recent development. Over roughly seven decades, the study of voting behaviour has grown from scattered observations into a disciplined field built on large surveys, statistical analysis, and detailed fieldwork. Tracing this journey shows how scholars learned to read the mind of the world’s largest electorate.

What voting behaviour studies actually examine
The early years: the 1950s and 1960s
Rajni Kothari and the founding of CSDS
Myron Weiner and comparative scholarship
A new momentum in the 1980s
The 1990s onward: election studies become regular
The Lokniti programme and the revival at CSDS
How Lokniti works
Studying the determinants of voting behaviour
Caste
Religion, class, and other factors
Why this evolution matters

What voting behaviour studies actually examine

Voting behaviour refers to how and why people vote the way they do. It is a sub-field of political sociology and political science that looks at the choices voters make and the social, economic, and psychological forces behind those choices. Researchers ask questions like: Does caste decide the vote? How much does a leader’s appeal matter? Do the poor and the rich vote differently?

These studies matter because they reveal how democracy works on the ground. They help us understand whether elections reflect genuine public opinion, how parties build support, and how voters connect with the political system. The field combines theory with hard data, which is why surveys and statistics became central to it.

The early years: the 1950s and 1960s

The first general elections were held in 1951-52, but serious academic study of voting did not begin immediately. Early work in the 1950s was limited and often relied on broad observations rather than structured data. The real shift came in the 1960s, when scholars started using systematic methods to study elections.

Rajni Kothari and the founding of CSDS

A turning point was the founding of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in Delhi in 1963 by Rajni Kothari. Kothari was a political scientist, theorist, and writer who became one of the most influential voices in Indian political science. He set up CSDS as a research institute for the social sciences and humanities, and it soon became the hub of election studies in the country.

Kothari’s broader work on Indian politics gave the field its conceptual backbone. His influential argument was that caste and politics shape each other, an idea often summed up in the observation that Indian politics is casteist and caste is politicised. This insight pushed researchers to study the social roots of the vote rather than treating voting as a purely individual act.

Myron Weiner and comparative scholarship

Working alongside Indian scholars was Myron Weiner, an American political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who specialised in Indian politics and had done fieldwork in the country since 1953. Weiner brought a comparative perspective and rigorous methods to the study of parties and elections.

The collaboration produced a landmark volume. Weiner and Kothari edited Indian Voting Behaviour: Studies of the 1962 General Elections, published in 1965. The project invited academics, journalists, and researchers to study the third general elections, marking one of the first organised efforts to examine voting patterns across the country. Weiner also built a large dataset, the Indian Voting Behavior Project, covering legislative assembly election returns from 1952 to 1967, with the constituency as the unit of analysis.

This period also saw the foundational survey work that later researchers would build on. Scholars such as Bashiruddin Ahmed, D.L. Sheth, and V.B. Singh helped lay the groundwork for opinion, attitude, and behaviour research in the 1960s and 1970s, even though their contribution is often overlooked today.

A new momentum in the 1980s

After the early burst of activity, election studies slowed for nearly two decades. The next major boost came in the 1980s. The key contribution was the book A Compendium of Indian Elections by Prannoy Roy, David Butler, and Ashok Lahiri.

This work gave fresh momentum to the field. It brought together detailed electoral data in an organised form and helped popularise the analysis of election results. David Butler was a noted British expert on elections, and the collaboration introduced more systematic data-handling and forecasting techniques into the Indian context. This decade laid the groundwork for the rise of psephology, the statistical study of elections and voting trends, which would soon reach a wide public audience through television.

The 1990s onward: election studies become regular

From the 1990s, election studies became a regular feature of research on electoral politics rather than occasional projects. One major reason was the sheer frequency of elections for state assemblies and the Lok Sabha, which created a steady demand for analysis and a constant stream of fresh data.

The Lokniti programme and the revival at CSDS

The initiative to restart systematic election studies in the 1990s was led by a team of scholars headed by Yogendra Yadav at CSDS. After teaching political science at Panjab University, Chandigarh, from 1985 to 1993, Yadav joined CSDS and brought the Centre back into election studies after a gap of nearly two decades.

Preparation for the 1996 election began about a year ahead, and a national seminar in December 1995 brought scholars together to design the study. This group eventually became the Lokniti programme. Yadav was the founder-convenor of the Lokniti network and the founder-director of the CSDS Lokniti research programme on comparative democracy. Lokniti is best known for conducting the National Election Studies (NES), described as the most comprehensive series of academic surveys of the Indian electorate.

How Lokniti works

What set Lokniti apart was its design. It functioned as an all-India collective of scholars from various universities who together fielded and analysed large surveys. This network model allowed researchers to cover a vast and diverse electorate using a common framework, with survey training and coordination spread across many states.

Yadav, who became one of the country’s most recognised psephologists through his election forecasts on television, also pioneered the practice of funding surveys through media sponsorships. This connected academic research to a mass audience and made survey-based analysis a familiar part of election coverage. Over time, the intellectual agenda of Lokniti expanded from the study of elections to the study of democratic politics more broadly, including comparative state politics.

Studying the determinants of voting behaviour

As survey research matured, scholars used it to study the determinants of voting behaviour, the factors that shape voter choice. These surveys made it possible to test long-standing assumptions with actual data rather than impressions.

Caste

Caste has consistently emerged as one of the most significant factors. The political scientist W.H. Morris-Jones famously noted that politics had become more important to caste and caste more important to politics than before. Parties routinely consider caste arithmetic when selecting candidates and forming alliances, and the politics around the Mandal Commission recommendations showed how central caste remains to electoral mobilisation.

Religion, class, and other factors

Religion is another important determinant. Despite India’s status as a secular state, parties frequently appeal to religious sentiments, and the presence of religion-based political parties keeps the factor active. Class and economic status also matter; survey data has shown that income levels and welfare schemes influence voting choices, with the growing middle class often prioritising development and stability.

Beyond these, scholars examine language, regional identity, gender, leadership, party performance, and the broader political wave of a given election. Studies have found that religion, socio-economic status, and party perception all shape voter choices in measurable ways. The strength of modern election studies lies in being able to weigh these factors against one another rather than relying on any single explanation.

Why this evolution matters

The journey from the scattered studies of the 1950s to the regular, survey-driven research of today reflects the deepening of democracy itself. Each phase added something new: Kothari and Weiner gave the field its founding concepts and first organised studies, the 1980s brought data and forecasting into the mainstream, and the Lokniti era made systematic surveys a permanent fixture.

This body of work helps researchers understand how democratic values have taken root among voters, how social identities shape political choices, and how the electorate changes over time. It has also made political analysis more transparent, moving public debate from guesswork toward evidence. For students of political process, this evolution is a reminder that understanding elections requires both careful theory and reliable data.

What do you think? Has the focus on factors like caste and religion helped us understand Indian voters better, or has it overshadowed other forces shaping the vote? As surveys and data become ever more central to election coverage, do you think they capture the real reasons people vote the way they do?

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Table of Contents

What voting behaviour studies actually examine 🔗

The early years: the 1950s and 1960s 🔗

Rajni Kothari and the founding of CSDS 🔗

Myron Weiner and comparative scholarship 🔗

A new momentum in the 1980s 🔗

The 1990s onward: election studies become regular 🔗

The Lokniti programme and the revival at CSDS 🔗

How Lokniti works 🔗

Studying the determinants of voting behaviour 🔗

Caste 🔗

Religion, class, and other factors 🔗

Why this evolution matters 🔗