The major discourse on social media on 17 April, when Karnataka went to the polls, was that the turnout was too low. It was primarily based on interim turnout numbers being put out every hour or two. The dominant discourse was that 17th being a Thursday preceding a long weekend (18th was a public holiday because of Good Friday), people had extended their long weekends rather than exercising their franchise.

The headline in the Deccan Herald, one of Bangalore’s most widely read newspapers, on Friday told a different story. “Impressive turnout in State", a front-page headline said. This contradicted the general discourse.

So, was the turnout in Karnataka high or low? With the Election Commission releasing official turnout numbers, we can analyse whether it was indeed high or low. The answer is not simple. All we can say is that it depends upon the frame of reference.

If we compare these elections with the previous Lok Sabha elections, the turnout was high.

The boxplot (see figure 1) shows the distribution of turnouts across constituencies in Karnataka for each of the past five elections.

A word about reading the box plots: the middle line of the box represents the median value, while the top and bottom of the box represent the 75th and 25th percentile values, respectively. Lines are drawn to two times the inter-quartile range (difference between 75th and 25th percentile values), and any dots outside the line represent outliers.

The trend is clear (see figure 1). The median voting percentage across constituencies in Karnataka, as seen by the middle line of the box plot, was increasing steadily between 1998 and 2004, only to see a sharp dip in 2009. This dip, however, has been corrected in 2014, with the median voting percentage being higher than in any of the four preceding elections. From this point of view, we can view the turnout as being high.

Figure 2 plots by assembly constituency the turnout in the 2014 parliamentary elections against the 2013 assembly elections. For reference, a line has been drawn at 45 degrees. Any points that lie below the line refer to assembly segments where the turnout in the assembly elections was more than in the parliamentary elections, and the distance of the point from the 45 degree line shows the degree of this difference.

There are two things one can notice from this figure. First, there are high-turnout constituencies and there are low-turnout constituencies, and the nature of elections doesn’t impact whether a constituency has high or low turnout. If one were to regress the turnout in the parliamentary elections against the turnout in the assembly elections, we would get an R square of 80% (in other words, 80% of the variance in the turnout in the parliamentary elections can be explained by the turnout in the assembly elections).

The second insight is that there a large number of data points form a line that is almost parallel to the 45 degree line we have drawn, which shows that the difference in turnout between parliamentary and assembly elections is fairly constant across constituencies. The question now arises as to where the turnout was low in the recent elections.

The dominant discourse is that turnout was low in Bangalore and high in the rest of Karnataka.

In order to analyse this, we will divide Karnataka into six broad regions (see figure 3)—Coastal Karnataka (districts of Dakshina Kannada, Udupi and Uttara Kannada), Bombay Karnataka (parts of Karnataka which were part of the erstwhile Bombay Presidency), Hyderabad Karnataka (which were under the Nizam’s rule before 1948), Central Karnataka (districts of Chickmagalur, Shimoga, Davanagere and Chitradurga), Old Mysore (erstwhile Mysore state excluding Bangalore City) and Bangalore City. We will look at the differences in polling between these elections and the last Assembly elections, and resort to our favourite box-plots.

What this shows us is that Bangalore does not have the worst difference in turnouts between parliamentary and assembly elections—that distinction goes to the rest of the Old Mysore region. If you look at the median difference in turnout across region, you will see that Bangalore is second only to coastal Karnataka in terms of having the least drop in voting percentage; the other regions of Karnataka perform worse than Bangalore.

The discourse that Bangalore did not vote because of the possibility of the four-day weekend does not hold water. The more likely reason for the low turnout in Karnataka is that the voters in the state have historically shown a general apathy for parliamentary elections—turnout in these elections is lower than for state elections.

Finally, is there a pattern in the 12 assembly segments that saw a higher voter turnout this time round than in the assembly elections last year? Of these 10 constituencies, one is in Bangalore city, three in the twin-cities of Hubli and Dharwad, two in Mangalore city and one in Mysore.

In other words, seven out of the 10 constituencies that have seen an increase in voting percentage compared with the 2013 assembly elections are in urban areas. That is definitely something to chew on.

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