Voter Turnout in India: A Constituency-level Empirical Analysis
Studies on voter turnout in India often fall short on scope or scale, thereby failing to provide strong conclusions. Thanks to newly available large-scale electoral data from Ashoka University’s Trivedi Centre for Political Data, this study sets out to explain the determinants of voter turnout in India at the constituency level. It reviews literature on turnout from India and other parts of the world to build a model that explains voter turnout using factors associated with individual elections. Our findings are generally consistent with the literature and indicate that the size and urbanization of a constituency along with closeness and competitiveness of elections are important in determining turnout in India’s general elections.