Bihar Assembly Elections 2020: An Analysis

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the 2020 Bihar assembly elections, highlighting poverty as a key factor influencing voting behavior, and introduces a novel method combining election and wealth data to study poverty's impact on election outcomes.

Contribution

It presents a novel methodological approach by integrating election data with wealth index data to analyze poverty's influence on voting patterns.

Findings

Poor voters favored the NDA.

AIMIM and LJP factors negatively impacted NDA.

Poverty was a crucial determinant during the pandemic.

Abstract

We analyse the Bihar assembly elections of 2020, and find that poverty was the key driving factor, over and above female voters as determinants. The results show that the poor were more likely to support the NDA. The relevance of this result for an election held in the midst of a pandemic, is very crucial, given that the poor were the hardest hit. Secondly, in contrast to conventional commentary, the empirical results show that the AIMIM-factor and the LJP-factor hurt the NDA while benefitting the MGB, with their presence in these elections. The methodological novelty in this paper is combining elections data with wealth index data to study the effect of poverty on elections outcomes.