Interview: Substantial partisanship as well as large share of volatile voters drive election swings

Indian voters don’t care about ideology and are not particularly attached to parties. They “vote their caste” rather than cast their vote. They also rarely coordinate well in picking candidates, leading to tremendous volatility in election outcomes. Those are just some of the long-standing stereotypes that recent research on India has sought to upend.

In the fifth interview of the CASI Election Conversations 2024, CASI Consulting Editor Rohan Venkat speaks to Francesca R Jensenius, Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo, about fresh data that reveals a larger stock of “partisans” among Indian voters than was previously understood, why the massive sizes of Indian constituencies skews our understanding of voter dynamics and what we still have to learn about how political parties mobilise voters.

Could you tell us about the questions that have animated your research?

Broadly speaking, I am interested in how state institutions shape society, how we can best design institutions and how they affect power dynamics between people. In the Indian context, I find it particularly interesting how formal institutions interact with informal institutions locally.

I am also interested in contributing to building bridges between debates in comparative politics and Indian politics. You will see in a lot of my work that I demonstrate that Indian voters...

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