Politics | Non-committed voters: Your vote can improve the country’s economic performance

File image: Twitter/PIB India

Mumbai votes today, 29th April 2019. The city has been relatively indifferent to general elections, with the voting percentage being just 53 percent even during the 2014 Modi wave. Voter turnout was as low as 41.4 percent in 2009. TV channels have been running campaigns to get people to vote, emphasizing that voting is a responsibility for every good citizen.

If you’re still deciding whether to go out and vote, the chances are you are an undecided voter. The committed voters, the ideological partisans, made up their minds long ago. Only the uncommitted voter is still wondering whom to vote for.

That voting is an obligation and an honour and similar arguments are fine, but the uncommitted voter typically wonders whether her vote makes a difference. And here’s the good news: a study shows that it is the uncommitted voter who, when she votes, does the most to improve economic growth.

A 2017 research paper titled ‘Non-committed voters and Indian growth: Evidence from India’ by Abhishek Bhardwaj of New York University, Prasanna Tantri from the Indian School of Business and Nagaraju Thota from BITS Pilani found that ‘representatives supported by such voters outperform significantly with respect to both constituency level outcomes as well as measures based on individual effort.’ Simply put, they’re the smart voters who choose their candidates wisely and well.

The researchers identified uncommitted voters as those who voted for candidates for one party in assembly elections and another in the Lok Sabha election, when these polls were conducted simultaneously. The assumption is that committed voters are likely to vote in favour of their preferred party candidate in both type of elections whereas non-committed voters are likely to vote differently. The authors find that, "a 10 percent higher support among non-committed voters is associated with 4.88 percent increase in district GDP growth, 4.76 percent increase in per capita GDP growth and 4.72 percent increase in per worker GDP growth over the entire term of five years. These numbers translate into nearly 1 percent annualized growth in various measures of GDP." The GDP figures are computed at the district level.

To be sure, we can question the exact increase in economic growth. But it’s plausible that non-committed voting is associated with higher economic performance, simply because such voters are likely to be swayed more by rational economic judgment and less by factors such as the carefully cultivated image of the contestants. Committed voters, on the other hand, are likely to be more ideologically motivated or biased. A research paper on the 2005 British election showed that undecided voters are "driven to a larger extent by economic performance and less by leadership or other valence evaluations." Valence evaluation is jargon for emotional choices.

The study on Indian elections mentioned above also found that candidates elected by non-committed voters performed better in Parliament and ensured a higher allocation to their districts under employment programmes.

Of course, the undecided voter is often apathetic. But the research says that if she does indeed take the trouble to go out and vote, it’s not just good for democracy but for the economy as well. As Bhardwaj, Tantri and Thota put it, "the association between democracy and economic performance is likely to strengthen in the presence of non-committed voting."

That should provide you, uncommitted voters, an incentive to head to the polling booths.