“Even If They Hurt Us”: Persistence of Partisan Attachment in India

• In Event: Elections, Party Systems, and Representation in India

Abstract

An emergent literature has highlighted the prevalence of partisan attachment among Indian voters, which was until recently deemed a minor aspect of voting behavior and popular politics. But we know little about the true extent of such partisan beliefs, particularly about how deeply they are held and what, if anything, moves them. We explore these questions using data from an original survey experiment conducted in India. Our findings reveal partisans to be largely unaffected by information about poor government performance, though the subject of such information matters. Partisans do show a decline, though insignificant, in the strength of their identification and their overall co-partisan government assessment when corruption information is shared with them. On the other hand, and somewhat more troubling, we find that when the shared information refers to communal discord, there is a small increase in partisan attachment. We further test the intractability of partisan attachment through a panel survey of respondents taken just before and after the devastating second wave of the coronavirus pandemic. While partisans attached to the Bhartiya Janta Party, the national party during this period, do markedly reduce their attachment in the immediate aftermath, they subsequently return to their party within a year. Even a substantial and widely publicised negative episode does not ultimately deter partisan loyalty. Our paper provides evidence of the importance of such loyalty among voters, which is made particularly relevant during the current political climate.

Author

• Ankita Barthwal, University of Oslo