Hindi media users more likely to back BJP: study

Citizens with higher exposure to the media were much more likely to have voted for the BJP in the 2014 Lok Sabha election, new research says

Citizens with higher exposure to the media were much more likely to have voted for the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 2014 Lok Sabha election, new research says. This was particularly true for those who read Hindi newspapers or watched TV news in Hindi.

Rahul Verma, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and Shreyas Sardesai of the Lokniti-Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi, who published their study in the Economic and Political Weekly, used data from National Election Studies (NES) conducted by the CSDS between 1996 and 2014. The 2014 NES covered over 20,000 respondents in 306 constituencies, and was demographically representative.

While 31.1 per cent of India voted for the BJP in 2014, the researchers found that this proportion went up to 39 per cent among those with higher media exposure and down to 27 per cent among those with lower media exposure. Those with higher media exposure were also more likely to consider Gujarat a well-governed State and favour Narendra Modi as Prime Minister.

However, at every level of media exposure, the BJP outdid the Congress. Moreover, as the election proceeded, support for the BJP and Mr. Modi grew at all levels of media exposure.

The BJP’s increased chances of doing well among those with more media exposure is not a new trend — even in years when it lost, the party did better among those with higher media exposure than those less exposed, Mr. Verma and Mr. Sardesai found.

The Congress, meanwhile, always does better than the BJP among voters with low media exposure.

The skew in media coverage towards the BJP in this election was unprecedented, Prabhakar, who heads the independent media monitoring agency CMS Media Lab, said. The BJP got 10 percentage points more prime-time coverage than the Congress in the two months before May 16, an unprecedented gap, they found. In 2009, the difference was not more than a percentage point or two, Mr. Prabhakar said.

But is this an association of correlation or causation? Correlation, Mr. Verma found. Those with high media exposure tend also to be richer, more urban, upper caste and younger — the quintessential BJP voter, the researchers found. However, even after all other demographic variables were held constant, voters who watched Hindi news on TV or read Hindi newspapers were still more likely to vote for the BJP.

No consistent link Mr. Prabhakar concurred, “There is no consistent link between media coverage and outcome. In 2004, the NDA got more coverage but the UPA won.”

TV remains the most popular source of news for Indians: 46 per cent in the NES sample watched news on TV every day as opposed to 26 per cent who got their news from newspapers. The Internet is still a fledgling source of news — radio (9 per cent) is nearly twice as popular as the Internet (5 per cent) as a source of daily news.