BackWhy Maharashtra assembly elections are not a two-cornered contest
Though there are 2 alliancesCongress-NCP and BJP-Shiv Senawith MNS playing a limited role, the electoral dynamics will be more complicated
Premium
Mumbai: The forthcoming Maharashtra elections are going to be a hard one to call for pollsters. On the face of it, it looks rather simple: there are two long-standing alliances—Congress-Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-Shiv Sena (SS) that are facing off against each other, with the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) likely to play a limited role in some constituencies. Looking at data from the 2009 elections, though, it looks more complicated.
In the 2009 elections, the Congress won 83 seats and its partner NCP got 62, with the two parties together exactly hitting the halfway mark of 145. It wasn’t a close election, however—the BJP and the Shiv Sena put together got only 89 seats, leading to a comfortable victory for the Congress party-led alliance.
Most small parties opened their accounts—among others, the MNS got 12 seats, while the Samajwadi Party and the PWP (Peasants and Workers Party) got four each.
The joker in the pack, however, were the independents—they got 15% of the total vote share, and bagged a total of 24 seats.
As we have discussed in earlier editions of Election Metrics, most poll prediction algorithms take as their starting point the results of the previous elections.
Irrespective of whether you go Bayesian or frequentist in your survey process, the most popular method for forecasting Indian elections remains calculating the “swing" from the previous elections.
Predictions are usually made by adding forecast swings to the previous election numbers. The question is how one treats independents when using a model like this one. While some independents might have been “truly independent" (not aligned with any party), in the Indian context, you come across a large number of “rebel candidates"—candidates who are denied tickets by their parties stand for elections as independents, and occasionally win. In the following elections, a number of things can happen to such candidates—they might be taken back by their parent parties and given a ticket, they might defect to a rival party or they might remain independent.
Even with domain knowledge and information of how each independent is likely to lean, taking care of the independent votes is going to be a huge issue.
Add to that the fact that an independent candidate got more than 20% of the vote in at least 65 constituencies in the 2009 elections (independent candidates came second in 38 constituencies, apart from the 24 where such candidates won), and the enormity of the problem of “treating" independents comes to the fore.
Even if we ignore the independents, the assessment that Maharashtra is a two-cornered contest is simply not true. An analysis of the 2009 assembly elections using the Effective Number of Parties–Votes (ENPV) methodology reveals that only 70 constituencies have one or two “effective parties". Of these 50 are BJP/SS versus INC/NCP fights.
In the ENPV methodology, we take the vote shares of each candidate in a constituency, square them and add them up. The reciprocal of this gives the effective number of parties.
Then, 140 constituencies see a three-cornered contest. While the MNS is party to 43 such contests, independents again make their presence felt by being part of 59 contests. Forecasting how these constituencies will fall is not going to be easy at all. One also needs to remember that nearly 70 constituencies saw four or more parties battling it out!
One saving grace for pollsters, however, is that we recently saw Lok Sabha elections in the state, and assembly segment-wise leads are available for those elections. The question is if we can make use of that in order to extrapolate for the state election. The problem with this approach, however, is that independents who played a big part in the last assembly elections were practically absent in the Lok Sabha elections, getting only 3% of all votes cast, and no seats. This, and the nature of issues in the state and parliamentary elections, means that the recent parliamentary elections are unlikely to be a good predictor for the forthcoming Maharashtra elections.
In spite of all this, what if we were to treat the Maharashtra assembly elections as a two-cornered contest between the Congress-NCP and Shiv Sena-BJP alliances? If we assume that the vote patterns for all other parties remains identical to the 2009 elections, we see that we need a 5 percentage points swing from the Congress-NCP combine to the Shiv Sena-BJP combine for the latter to get a majority of seats in the assembly, though half that swing will suffice for the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance to get more seats than the Congress-NCP alliance. This table (Figure 3) must be taken with some salt, though, since the analysis is rather simplistic.
Finally, the discourse goes that the MNS, by competing against the BJP-Shiv Sena combine in the 2009 elections, acted as a spoiler for the combine, which handed over the elections on a platter to the Congress-NCP alliance. If we were to add wholesale the votes of the MNS to the votes garnered by the BJP-Shiv Sena combine, the results are startling. The combine, which won 89 seats in the assembly would have won 101 seats if all of the MNS’s votes had been transferred to it.
On the other hand, the Congress-NCP number would remain absolutely still at 145! While the MNS might have damaged the chances of the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance, the election results would have been absolutely identical in its absence!
(This story has been modified from its original version to reflect a correction in the graphic.)
Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed – it's all here, just a click away! Login Now!
