Women voters can’t be taken for granted

Atanu Biswas
Professor, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata

THE 2019 Lok Sabha elections are supposedly going to be dominated by social media. However, a tiny proportion of women posts political messages and is active on social/mainstream media. It’s primarily a male-dominated scenario as far as expressing political views and preferences is concerned.

In India, women are increasingly taking part in the political process and the democratic exercise, and the gap between the percentages of men’s and women’s votes has steadily decreased over the years. It was 16.68 per cent (male: 63.31 per cent, female: 46.63 per cent) in the 1962 Lok Sabha election; 9.58 per cent (male: 68.18 per cent, female: 58.60 per cent) in 1984; 8 per cent (male: 52.65 per cent, female: 44.65 per cent) in 2004; and only 1.46 per cent (male: 67.09 per cent, female: 65.63 per cent) in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. Who knows, women might outvote men in 2019.

The idea of ‘voting gender gap’ is well-known in the context of the US —this being the difference in the percentage of men’s and women’s votes for a particular candidate. Republican candidates like Thomas Dewey (1948), Dwight Eisenhower (1952, 1956) and Richard Nixon (1960) got more support from women voters. Interestingly, the wave of female support shifted towards the Democrats, which might be the result of an increasing emphasis on women’s issues such as the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion. A ‘gender gap’ in voting for presidential candidates has become apparent since 1980, when Jimmy Carter enjoyed an 8 percentage point gap in women’s support over Ronald Reagan. This has been the average ‘voting gender gap’ in the US presidential elections since then, although these often range from 4 to 14 percentage points. There was only 4 percentage points gender gap for Bill Clinton against George HW Bush in 1992. The gender gap in the 2016 presidential elections was 13 percentage points, with 54 per cent of the women supporting Hillary Clinton compared to 41 per cent of the men. The gender gap varies with the candidates, platforms and the important issues in different elections.

In the UK, the women’s vote is more closely shared by the Conservative Party and Labour, although the latter enjoyed greater female support in the 2017 General Election.

If the women’s overall voting percentage is less, the higher proportion of the women’s vote favouring a party would matter less. And it would become significant when the overall women’s vote percentages would increase. ‘Voting gender gap’ is more significant in a country like the US as women generally turn out to vote at higher rates than male voters in that country. For example, in 2008, 65.7 per cent of the eligible women voted, while this percentage for men was 61.5. Thus, even modest gender differences are politically consequential.

It is better to realise that ‘men decide elections’ is a myth, quite clearly in our country as well. It is believed that Nitish Kumar was re-elected in 2015 due to a huge turnout of women voters. In their recent book The Verdict, Prannoy Roy and Dorab R Sopariwala illustrated that in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the NDA had a 19 per cent lead over the UPA among the male voters, whereas this lead was only 9 per cent among the women voters. Thus, if the 2014 parliamentary elections had witnessed polling only by male voters, the NDA would have bagged 376 seats, whereas it would have been down to 265 seats had only women voted. 

According to a CSDS (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies) study on the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, 70 per cent women said they didn't consult their husbands whom they would vote for. However, Roy and Sopariwala believe that at least 80 per cent women voters make up their mind on their own. Certainly, a whopping percentage of women are voting independently. In a 2014 post-election study, Lokniti found that 19 per cent of the men and women voted for the Congress, while 33 per cent of the men and 29 per cent of the women voted for the BJP. Parties like the BSP, AIADMK and the All India Trinamool Congress did better among women than among men in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.

Thus, even a 2 per cent increase in women's vote in favour of a party means nearly 1 per cent increase of their overall vote share. And, these votes being usually clustered in some places where the corresponding party is strong, it might become decisive in many constituencies. Consequently, it is natural for the political parties to try to get women’s support in various ways, often en bloc, on different grounds. But, since the women in the country are relatively silent voters, it is never an easy task. Political parties need to be careful that these efforts do not cost them the men’s vote. For example, there has been a shift in the voting pattern in the US since the 1980s — while the Democrats gained substantial women’s votes, they lost some of their male voters, who shifted loyalty to the Republicans. Women in India do not constitute monolithic voting block; rather, they can be sliced and diced into discrete groups with conflicting political and social affiliations. 

The American experience, at least, is that women constitute a far more politically diverse group when their voting habits are analysed on the basis of race, age and marital status. There are inadequate studies in the Indian context, but women are definitely not a vote bank in the country. Thus, for the political parties hoping to woo women voters, there is possibly no single women’s issue that might work for the country as a whole.

In any case, women’s vote was possibly never so important as it is now.