Understanding Incumbency and Women’s Electoral Participation in Indian Elections
The trend of anti-incumbency in recent Indian politics was visible again in 2014 when the incumbent Indian National Congress only managed to retain 20% of the constituencies they won in the previous election.
Using electoral data from the Election Commission of India, this paper attempts to estimate the size of this anti-incumbency effect by exploiting a close-election regression discontinuity design. In addition it looks at gendered aspects of this incumbency effect in order to understand female electoral participation in India.
Fig. 1: Overall Anti-incumbency Effect
Fig. 5: Women’s Electoral Participation in t=1
