Introduction
Elections in India are notable for their volatility: voters’ choices are notoriously difficult to predict, with large vote swings from one election to the next. Adding to this uncertainty is the fact that historically, party brands are weak and official party membership is low. It is no wonder then that partisanship has not featured prominently in discussions of contemporary Indian politics. In political science parlance, the term “partisanship” is used to describe the stable and emotional attachment that some voters feel toward political parties. This emotional attachment, which transcends mere support for the party at the ballot, is prevalent among voters in most parts of the world and affects political discourse and behavior in fundamental ways.
For instance, no conversation about elections in the United States can take place without reference to “Democrats” and “Republicans.” Indeed, some voters’ loyalty to a specific party is seen as so fundamental that it is considered a part of their social identity. In India, the idea of partisanship has received little attention, but similar terms do exist: “Bhajpaai,” “Comrade,” or “Congressi” are frequently used to describe party loyalists to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Communist Party of India (Marxist), and the Indian National Congress (INC, or Congress Party), respectively. These terms reflect a belief that at least some people have entrenched partisan affiliations.
As Indians head to the polls to select a new parliament in April–June, anecdotal evidence suggests that party loyalty is rising, with an increasing share of voters self-identifying with the ruling BJP and social media echo chambers polarizing political debates. This article aims to show that, contrary to the received wisdom, partisanship in India not only has been fairly high and stable over time but also has significant effects on the political behavior of ordinary Indians.
Why Partisanship Matters
Measuring partisanship involves asking people about their self-identification into party camps. Hence, the most common survey question to measure such attachment is simply: “Which party do you identify with?” Other times, voters are asked whether there is a party they feel close to or how they feel about different parties. In some studies, researchers have also tried to experimentally tease out the strength of individuals’ partisan attachment. Several decades of research suggest that partisan attachment remains surprisingly stable over time, even when parties or individuals change their policy positions.
These lasting attachments influence several outcomes in the political space. Three in particular are worth mentioning.
First, partisans are believed to be loyal voters, meaning that parties can be reasonably certain that these voters will turn out and support them on the election day. This makes elections more predictable and allows parties and politicians to focus on developing long-term policy platforms rather than spending their energy and resources on short-term, populist measures to sway voters.
Second, partisanship shapes how people understand the political world by serving as a heuristic to interpret political information. People tend to believe that if their party views an issue favorably, then they too should hold a similar view. Therefore, parties play a role in shaping opinions, which can make it easier for voters to follow key debates and hold elected representatives accountable.
Third, partisanship shapes how people interpret the information they receive. Those who feel attached to parties are more likely to be biased in favor of whatever the party does. They are more willing to ignore negative information about the party and more likely to pounce on negative information about other parties. This bias, often referred to as motivated reasoning, hampers objective evaluation and can increase hostility between groups. Scholars of partisan polarization are concerned about increasingly siloed camps, arguing that this may further enhance distrust and stymie political deliberation.
Studies from the United Kingdom, Europe, and several other democratic contexts attest to the global relevance of partisanship. Voters tend to self-sort into party camps even in the presence of more than two parties and in systems with proportional representation. However, all of these polities share one key similarity: the political party system is well-institutionalized. Such parties are stable entities with clearly defined ideological profiles, which helps boost party attachment. Nevertheless, even in less-institutionalized contexts such as Brazil, Türkiye, Argentina, Mexico, and Taiwan, there is a growing belief that partisanship plays an important role in shaping democratic competition.
Measuring Partisanship in India
In India, as in other contexts characterized by unstable and unpredictable voting patterns, partisanship may not appear to matter at first glance. Indeed, the very presence of high electoral volatility—a measure of vote swings between parties across elections—seems to suggest that voters do not stay loyal to any one party.
Still, when asked about political preferences, voters often express clear partisan loyalties. In fieldwork in Himachal Pradesh before the 2022 state assembly elections, the authors observed several instances of this. Most memorably, a group of women in the Shimla rural district were keen to discuss their individual party preferences, making sure to highlight how these differed from the rest of their families’. Even after marrying into families with different partisan preferences, these women held onto their own partisan opinions.
Such attitudes were also visible at the aggregate level. Figure 1 tracks the presence of partisanship across India, drawing on various waves of National Election Studies (NES) data. Each election cycle, survey respondents were asked: “Is there any political party you particularly feel close to?”
In India, around 30 percent of survey respondents expressed partisan attachments, lower than comparable large democracies like the United States or United Kingdom but closer to developing contexts like Brazil or Argentina. Nevertheless, what is striking is the relative stability of partisanship despite periods of massive political shifts. In the fifty-year period in question, the Indian political system has moved from single-party dominance under the Congress Party to a more fragmented party system marked by coalition rule and then back to a single-party system dominated by the BJP.
This raises the question: which parties do voters feel especially close to? In India, a huge number of parties contest elections, but few of them survive more than one electoral cycle. As Figure 2 demonstrates, the vast majority of the parties that contested national elections in India between 1962 and 2019 participated in only one general election.
Of course, some parties have exhibited staying power, and many of them have developed unique party brands. Most prominent are the Congress Party and the BJP. NES data from 2019 indicate that more than half of the self-identified partisans across India report feeling close to either the Congress Party (19.2 percent) or the BJP (41.2 percent). Other parties with footholds in particular states, like the Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party, All India Trinamool Congress party, and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), also have partisans, but since their support is regionally concentrated, none of them were named by more than five percent of partisan loyalists at the national level.
Figure 3 looks at how partisanship varies based on a variety of individual-level characteristics, using data from an original field survey the authors conducted in Himachal Pradesh in 2022 in advance of the state assembly elections. In a random sample of 3,200 respondents, the overall level of partisanship was 52 percent. The results showed that women, members of the Scheduled Castes, and those with limited media exposure were less likely to express a partisan attachment. The association between educational attainment and partisanship is not as clear, although respondents with more than a primary education exhibited somewhat higher levels of partisanship than those who were either illiterate or barely attended school.
How Partisanship Matters
There is compelling evidence that partisanship exists in India, but how might it matter for elections? In line with studies from other parts of the world, survey data indicate that Indian partisans are substantively different from nonpartisan voters in three crucial respects: voting stability, informed political opinions, and biased reasoning.
The first point is related to the stability of voting patterns in Indian general elections. According to data on voters in the 2019 general elections, about 61 percent of partisan voters repeated their vote choice from 2014, compared to 54 percent of nonpartisans, and about 64 percent of the partisans voted for the party they said they felt close to.
It might seem underwhelming that less than two-thirds of partisans eventually voted for the party they identify with, given that many voters regularly proclaim to be party loyalists. However, this number is biased downward because parties do not always field candidates in every electoral constituency in every election cycle. For instance, if a party forms a preelection alliance with another party, the two allies will typically divide the seats they contest in—what is commonly known as a seat-sharing pact. When considering only constituencies where the party in question actually fielded a candidate for reelection, close to 86 percent of respondents supported the party they reported feeling loyal to. This signals a high degree of stability for this particular voter group.
In other parts of the world, partisanship is associated with more informed political behavior, higher trust in parties, and more belief in the efficacy of the vote—all of which are considered signs of democratic health. There is compelling evidence for the same logic working among Indian partisans. For instance, the authors’ survey in Himachal Pradesh revealed that partisans were much more likely to express trust in political parties, far less ambiguous about political choices, and better at deciphering issue ownership among parties. Notably, partisanship is associated with these traits even when education, media exposure, and political interest were held constant.
Although stable partisanship might be a sign of democratic vibrancy, it also has its downsides, namely partisan polarization. Many studies outside of India find that greater consolidation along party lines and a shrinking middle ground are linked to an increase in partisan animus between groups. While there is no systematic data from India on the levels of animosity between supporters of the two main poles in India—the Congress Party and the BJP—there is increasing evidence that party identities have a marked effect on co-partisans’ worldview. For instance, a recent survey of young, urban-dwelling Indians found evidence of substantial co-partisan bias: partisan respondents attached to either the Congress Party or the BJP exhibited little agreement over politically colored issues such as India’s G20 presidency or even about supposedly objective issues related to population growth and current economic conditions.
Assessing negative feelings toward another party, commonly called “negative partisanship,” is another way in which researchers detect partisan animus. Typically measured by asking respondents if there is any party that they dislike or would not support, negative partisanship is associated with negative opinions not just about the other party but also about people associated with that party. Our survey revealed that partisans were indeed more likely to express negative partisanship; compared to nonpartisans, they were twice as likely to name parties they would never support. However, disaggregated by partisan identity, the picture is more nuanced. Only 26.4 percent of the BJP partisans and 20.5 percent of Congress Party partisans expressed a strong distaste for other parties. This signals less partisan rigidity than one might expect, indicating that unmitigated political polarization is perhaps not as widespread as commonly believed.
Conclusion
Despite claims to the contrary, partisanship plays a significant role in Indian elections. High levels of electoral volatility and ubiquitous party switching conceal the presence of partisan loyalties among a substantial share of Indian voters. These loyalties are apparent in survey data, interviews with voters, and aggregate election patterns. The stabilization of political competition, featuring a similar set of parties running in election after election, has the potential for further fostering partisanship in India.
Extant data indicate that heightened partisanship can translate into more informed, engaged voters who demand greater accountability from their elected leaders. Fostering such partisanship also has clear advantages for political parties, since partisan voters tend to be steadfast and decisive in their opinions and actions. In the current context, this means that parties that enjoy substantive partisanship, such as the BJP, can be confident of their future prospects.
At the same time, intensely held partisan identities risk hampering deliberative democracy. While parties may seek to stir up partisan emotions in their favor, unchecked bias—particularly during election times—can cloud voter judgements. To translate partisan sentiments into healthy political engagement, India will need to ensure the free flow of reliable political information as well as open political debates in which supporters of competing political camps engage with those espousing alternative viewpoints. By discouraging such engagement, the current political climate runs the risk of creating belligerent camps, thereby undermining the positive potential of partisanship.
In the months ahead, Carnegie scholars and contributors will be analyzing various dimensions of India’s upcoming election battle—including the role foreign policy plays, the impact of women voters, and the evolution of conservative parties. Keep up to date with the project here.