Indian polls and the art of psephology

What makes India difficult to survey electorally is complicated nature of its politics, deep fragmentation of voters.

The psephologist GVL Narasimha Rao was once on television with one of Indian media’s best minds, the columnist Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar. This was a decade or more ago and results for a general election, for which Rao had made some predictions through opinion polling, were coming in.

As they did, it became clear that Rao had got the thing quite wrong. His losers were winning and his winners losing in many, if not most big states. When Aiyar noticed this, Rao said he may have had the states wrong but pointed out he had got the national total more or less right.

It struck me that this sort of opinion poll was more the product of guesswork than any science. Rao is now a Bharatiya Janata Party member and adviser and I don’t think his loss is going to be a fatal blow to the field of psephology.

In the last few years, opinion polling and exit polling has actually become quite good in India. And so has psephology — the study of elections, from the root Greek word meaning pebble which, Aristotle tells us in his work The Athenian Constitution, was used in Athens as a ballot.

American presidential elections are accurately predicted by samples of less than 1,000 spread over 50 states. This is not that difficult to do because many states (for instance California, Mississippi and New York) tend to vote so predictably for or against parties that they may safely be excluded. America’s two-party system also makes it a relatively easy place for psephologists.

What makes India difficult to survey electorally is the complicated nature of its politics and the deep fragmentation of its voters. Voting is not done on the basis of ideology mainly, and sometimes not even for or against parties, but along the lines of community, caste and sub-caste.

Getting a proper representation of communities is a difficult task and certainly beyond the means of a survey with a limited budget and not much time.

I noticed that many of the opinion polls had sample sizes of 2,000 or so for a state that has a population of 60 million. To be able to get it right from this small a number is quite remarkable. It is to the credit of India’s polling agencies that they are able to consistently nail the result, as they have in the last few years.

The current cycle of elections that ended in a few Indian states are expected to bring great news for the BJP and dread to the Congress. Opinion polls and exit polls show a sweep for the BJP in almost every state and this is attested to by a surge of enthusiasm in the voting figures. India’s democracy is healthy but even by its standards, the numbers of people turning up to vote — over 65 per cent in most states — shows that there is something stirring.

Some political parties, especially an insecure Congress, are not so enthusiastic about opinion polls.

Every so often, even the Election Commission of India talks of ‘banning’ them or regulating them. This is something that cannot be done without violating the right to freedom of speech (which is constitutionally very curtailed in India, but even so).

The fear is that the opinion poll, especially one that is skewed, will induce people to change the way they vote. Media outlets have been measured in the way they have released their findings and held back their final tallies till all the states had finished polling.

The best way to respond to the threat of a ban is to follow this rule and to consistently get it right.

A good friend of mine sent a message the other day that the insiders at the opinion polling agencies were not very sure of their numbers, given the surge of voting, and thought that the trend might well be against the BJP and for the Congress.

It will be an aberration if that should happen, because as I have said, the polls have been spot on for many years, and I don’t think they have it wrong this time either.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 8^th, 2013.

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