Women’s vote a key factor in recent polls, says psephologist

Reading the mood of the woman voter has been a challenge, says Pradeep Gupta

Women show their voter ID cards as they queue up to vote. File

As result day for the Assembly polls in four States and one Union Territory looms, one of the important factors in elections in the recent past has been the women’s vote, which has proved decisive in the ensuing result. How to read the mood of the woman voter has been a challenge, according to Pradeep Gupta, who heads Axis MyIndia, one of India’s more successful psephology outfits, in his book How India Votes And What It Means (Juggernaut).

In the chapter dedicated to reading the women vote, Mr. Gupta relates his experience of getting two exit polls wrong, Tamil Nadu in 2016 and Bihar in 2020, because of this failure to accommodate voting preferences of women.

Mr. Gupta writes on the 2016 exit polls in Tamil Nadu thus: “In our exit poll 88% of the respondents were male and only 12% female and in our post-poll analysis we found that the female voters differed from the male voters.” The women showed a marked preference for the AIADMK while men had an even spread of choices with Jayalalithaa returning to power breaking a long streak of alternation.

In Bihar 2020, while Mr. Gupta’s team made sure that sample sizes were well balanced, women voted in larger numbers than men in this election, around 5.13%, which, he says, was revealed much later than the exit polls were aired.

Welfare schemes

Women are not a homogeneous category however, and welfare schemes aimed at them work better in political mobilisation than the gender of the leader. He cites Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and the late Tamil Nadu Chief Ministers M.G. Ramachandran and Jayalalithaa as having had firm support from women that has led to long stints in office.

“I will, however, take the liberty of making another rather simplistic yet factual observation. If women voters were to be classified according to region, I would say women in the five southern States of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana vote independently, sans the influence of male members of the family whereas in north India they go by the judgment of the dominant male in the household, usually the father, husband, father-in-law,” he writes, adding that while his surveyors were directed by women to male members of the household when asked for voting preferences in Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Maharashtra, Gujarat, West Bengal and Odisha, it was not so in the South where surveyors were confided in but asked to keep the preference secret from male members of the household, often because the voter preference was diametrically opposite to the men in the household.

Higher literacy

Mr. Gupta says higher literacy and employment rates for women in south India make them a more assertive voting category there.

The upcoming results in four States and one Union Territory will again provide an opportunity to test this thesis, and especially in West Bengal where Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee has enjoyed strong support from women voters and implemented schemes like “Kanyashree” aimed at women. The rise in the women’s vote as distinct from the male in terms of preferences or choice points is an interesting development that needs to be studied further.