REASEARCH METHODOLOGY

Chapter Review – How India (Really) Votes

The Chapter How India (Really) Votes mainly focuses about how the Polling in India is
conducted during the elections. The discussion in this chapter is about who votes, how
they cast their vote based on their ideology, how Indians are separated mainly in two
groups based on their opinions, how the religion politics affect the voters. This chapter
also presents the data and facts about how Women have impacted the voter turnout in
India.
The discussion in this chapter begins with the Bihar’s State election in 2015 about how
the Polling conducted was wrong and the pollsters blamed coding error as a reason.
This Chapter describes how Election polling is made available to voters through
agencies. And Pollsters have framed a narrative that caste, religion, individual leaders
does not affect the voters but they only cast their vote based on development,
country’s economy, Jobs.
The Chapter then presents the fact about how the Indian voters are Polarised and BJP
voters supports the Hindutva, Nationalists issues while the Congress voters oppose
them. Religion is one of the main factor on which Indian voters are committed upon.
Chapter describes about how Dalits voters plays an important role in defining the
election results while presenting the data that over 45% of Dalit voters said it was
important to them that candidate from their own caste wins the election form their
constituency. Chapter also explains how young voters focuses more on the
developmental, economic growth, employment issues rather than religious identity
while casting their vote. Then the Chapter goes onto explain about that polling just not
only predicts the result but also produces research about what voters have voted for.
So that’s why Polling need to be done in a transparent way.
The Chapter How India (Really) votes is a gem in explaining the ideology of Indian
voters. The chapter explains it by specifying the different groups of Indian voters. And
from my learning from this chapter about polling that it needs to be done in huge
numbers rather than a sample sizing so that it can be matched with the results while
also taking into account with the issues like religious identity, same caste leaders,
ideology with development, economy, jobs, etc.

Anas Shaikh (1172210129)

SY BA (Pol.Sci)