Media exposure and voter behaviour

BY sevanti ninan| IN Opinion | 09/10/2014

Recent research has tried to understand the link between media exposure and voting behavior based on election studies done since 1996.

SEVANTI NINAN on a LOKNITI-CSDS analysis.

TALKING MEDIA
Sevanti Ninan

Does media exposure today feed into voter behavior tomorrow?

As we emerge from another NarendraModi-centred television blitz over the last fortnight, and head into another set of elections, recent research from Lokniti-CSDS (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies) is useful to look at. It has tried to understand the link between media exposure and voting behavior based on a longish track of election studies done by the Centre since 1996.

It covers five elections and provides a basis in data for all the pop theorizing that the chattering classes have been doing this year about the BJP victory and the media. It set out primarily to see if there was a correlation between media usage and voter behavior in the 2014 elections.

How do the researchers Rahul Verma and ShreyasSardesai determine the effect of media on voting behaviour? They use data from CSDS election studies to measure the association between a respondent’s reported media exposure and his or her political views. They used two logistic regression models, controlling for socio-demographic factors. If you don’t buy their methodology you cannot accept their findings.

To begin with, they demonstrate with the data that this correlation between voting for the BJP and media exposure pre-dates the 2014 election. The last two decades have seen the Indian electorate have more exposure to media than ever before, and they hypothesize that electorates with higher exposure to media were more likely to vote for the BJP. This trend became visible from 1996 though it did not hold in 2009. While in the 1996 elections 28.8 percent of the actual vote went to the Congress and 23.8 per cent to the BJP, the percentage of people with high media exposure who voted for the BJP was 31 per cent compared to 24 per cent for the Congress. In 1999 the gap widened to the BJP’s advantage, in 2004 it closed with both parties getting the same percentage of vote of those with high media exposure: 24. In 2009 those with all categories of media exposure—low, medium, high—voted much more for the Congress. Could this be because as the authors say media is significant but only one of the variables that influence voting?

And then of course in 2014 the trend crystalized dramatically in favour of the BJP with 39 per cent of those with high media exposure voting for the BJP as compared to 15 per cent for the Congress. Those with medium and low exposure too voted substantially more for the BJP. You could put it down to the amount of news MrModi was making personally, because the study quantifies it. With the events he attended, the rallies he addressed and the way his campaign used the internet and mobile telephony, he actually connected with one in four voters in this country, believe it or not.

What do the researchers consider high media exposure? Regular TV news consumption (daily or sometimes) or regular reading of newspapers. Medium and low exposure are classified as rarely reading or viewing, and never reading or viewing. Their definitions are not very precise. They measure media penetration using a variety of sources to estimate that the percentage of voters who watch TV news daily went up from 19 per cent in 1996 to 46 per cent in 2014. Radio news listening declined, but daily newspaper readership almost doubled. They say theproportion of people who never read newspapers has come down by three times in the last two decades.

The study makes three positive correlations. One is between high media exposure and support for economic liberalisation. The second is between those with exposure to opinion polls and voting for the BJP. The third is interesting: respondents with high media exposure were four times more likely to say that Gujarat as a state was performing the best as compared to those with low or medium media exposure. And the researchers conclude that Gujarat seems to have tilted the balance in favour of the BJP. Clearly the media obsession with the Gujarat model paid off for Modi.

They also concludes that those who watch news in Hindi are more likely to vote for the BJP than those who watch English or regional news, but the effect of social media and the web on the election outcome, would not have been significant because of its relatively minimal reach.

The second conclusion that the study draws is significant. Higher media exposure made voters more likely to support economic liberalization, but they were not likely to be less socially conservative. Perhaps because (they say) social conservatism is correlated with caste and community variables, and media exposure has little impact on it.

And who were those with highest media exposure? Writing in the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW) the authors say that the time-series NES (National Election Study) data shows that voters with higher media exposure generally tended to be more urban, more educated, wealthier, younger and belonging to higher castes. Meanwhile a separate study derived from NES data published in the same issue of EPW (September 27, 2014) on class voting in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections confirms significantly higher voter turnout among the middle and upper middle classes in 2014.

If media exposure helps a party win elections MrModi is again on a roll for the upcoming polls, fresh from being portrayed as having stormed America, and now hitting the stump again with his party getting prime time coverage organized. I say organized because while similar footage appeared of some of his Maharashtra appearances on every channel, one of them (ABP Mhaja) actuallydeclared that they were using BJP footage.

But if MrModi is to bring both governance and social change, his media exposure cannot let up. As PratapBhanu Mehta says in his Indian Express column, if he believes that the central element of a theory of social change is to communicate all the time, his regime will have to be in perpetual communication overdrive, which is what is happening now. The prime minister is in our face, pushing every kind of drive—make in india, clean up india, prune its laws, rein in itsbabus. And because the media is now hooked on its daily PM fix, it will let itself be co-opted. Till something changes.

This is an expanded version of a column which appeared in Mint on 9 October, 2014.