In the 2014 general election, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) notched a historic victory, becoming the first party to win an outright majority in India’s lower house of Parliament (Lok Sabha) since 1984 and only the second party ever to achieve that distinction, after the Indian National Congress (INC, also known as the Congress Party). In 2019, the BJP repeated this feat, ushering in pronouncements that India was witnessing the dawn of a “fourth party system,” this time with the BJP firmly at the helm. As Indians turn their gaze toward next spring’s 2024 polls, there is an ongoing debate about what drives the BJP’s success and what, if anything, those factors say about the political landscape in the coming general election.
Scholarly responses to such questions have, historically, made little mention of political ideology. Rather, the dominant political science discourse has long characterized India as a “patronage democracy” in which political behavior is best understood through the lenses of clientelism and identity-based parochialism. According to these accounts, politicians and their supporters primarily engage in a quid pro quo exchange of votes for expected material benefits; policy is viewed as important only insofar as it alters the perceived likelihood that an individual—or their community—will receive more government resources.
The lack of attention to political ideology contrasts strongly, however, with the recent ubiquity of ideological debates in Indian politics. For instance, the BJP has emphasized and sought to establish ownership over cultural issues, contrasting its Hindu nationalist positions with the so-called secular opposition’s policies. The BJP’s 2014 election campaign was defined by the idea of radical change. It promised potential voters an efficient, corruption-free government that would deliver on ambitious development projects, generate employment opportunities, strengthen India’s position in the world through a more aggressive approach to national security and foreign policy, and—importantly—pave the way for India’s “true Hindu identity” to flourish. Since its ascent to power, the BJP has further demonstrated that its ideological priorities are more than just hollow talk. Especially in the post-2019 era, the BJP has enacted several policies in service of its Hindu nationalist agenda, including the nullification of Article 370 governing the status of Jammu and Kashmir, the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act, and the introduction of several statutes against religious conversions (popularly termed “love jihad” laws) in states the party governs.
The BJP’s behavior in power suggests that scholars have too quickly dismissed the role of ideology in Indian politics and that, on the contrary, the careful study of political ideology can inform understandings of the political landscape in India today. Inspired by recent work that has pushed back against traditional narratives and argued that ideology matters more across a wider range of contexts than has previously been acknowledged, this article describes a recent study scrutinizing the role of political ideology in India today.
Measuring Political Ideology in India
To test the salience of ideology in contemporary Indian politics, this study followed a three-pronged approach, consisting of a comprehensive online study carried out in 2022, a phone survey with a representative sample of respondents in 2023, and an analysis of representative National Election Studies data (collected in person by the Lokniti Programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies) from three points in time (2009, 2014, and 2019). This article describes results from the online study, which are broadly consistent with findings drawn from the other two samples. Our sample of 2,393 Indian respondents was recruited from market research company Cint’s online panel and was drawn to be representative of the nation on age and gender. To ensure diversity in geography, demographics, and state-level political configurations, we collected data on residents in twelve of India’s largest cities, ranging across all major regions of the country. Data were collected from August to September of 2022.
To investigate ideology in India, the first task is to identify the key issue areas that divide citizens. Divides in Indian society occur along different fault lines than those in high-income, Western countries. Studies of industrialized democracies have largely conceptualized ideology along a unidimensional scale ranging from left/liberal (favoring social change and the redistribution of wealth) to right/conservative (favoring social stability and the free market). This paradigmatic understanding of political ideology has lent itself to a relatively straightforward measurement of political ideology in many Western democracies, wherein individuals are asked to place themselves on a scale ranging from very left/liberal to very right/conservative.
However, the Indian context would likely render such a conceptualization ineffective. The left-right scale found in many long-standing democracies does not have a ready-made analogue in the Indian context and, hence, many Indian survey respondents might find it difficult to place themselves along a conventional left-right spectrum. On the contrary, a different set of issues has come to define the ideological space in India. There are numerous explanations for these differences; notably, political scientists Pradeep K. Chhibber and Rahul Verma reason that the set of issues characterizing the creation of the modern Indian nation-state differ from those in Western Europe (where class-based divisions were dominant). Salient topics may differ in countries like India that are diverse, multiethnic polities. Drawing on this foundational work and more recent political developments, our study identifies three main issue areas around which contemporary Indian political ideology revolves:
- the role of the state in driving economic and social policy
- the role of the state in addressing historical inequalities
- Hindu nationalism
While the first two issue areas were derived largely from the work of Chhibber and Verma, the third was sourced from the authors’ understanding of Indian politics today as being largely driven by the BJP, which has firmly staked out its position on the role of religion in society. Finally, to investigate the intuition that ideology in India is not driven by the same types of issues as in Western contexts, the survey probed issues that are unlikely to characterize the ideological space in India but that are often utilized in studies of political ideology in countries like the United States, namely, questions on abortion and military spending.
For each issue, the survey asked respondents the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with an opinion statement associated with that issue. For example, on the issue of the state’s role in poverty alleviation—a long-standing debate in Indian politics since independence—the survey presented respondents with the following statement, drawing from historical election polls: “The government should have special schemes to uplift the poor and disadvantaged.” Similarly, regarding the state’s role in addressing historical inequalities across caste groups, the survey elicited reactions to the following statement: “There should be reservations for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in schools and universities.”
Taking the aggregate set of responses to several such issue statements, the researchers employed ideal point estimation to consider whether individuals’ issue preferences could be explained by an underlying, latent structure, or “ideology,” and, if so, around which issues ideology was organized and how much explanatory power it possessed. As part of this exercise, the study estimated each individual’s relative location, or “ideal point,” in this ideological space. This allows for an examination of how individuals’ ideologies correlate with their views and behaviors.
Political Ideology Matters in India
The findings strongly indicate that political ideology does, indeed, matter in India. First, a single ideological dimension can explain a substantial proportion of the variation in individuals’ views on issues relating to Hindu nationalism, state intervention, and minority rights. Second, individuals’ estimated ideologies along this single dimension are predictive of their stated partisan affiliations and reported political behaviors in ways that map onto public understandings.
To demonstrate the close association between ideology and partisanship in the data, figure 1 displays average ideal point estimates based on individuals’ stated partisan affiliations (elicited earlier in the survey). Individuals who identified with parties that are generally understood to be right-wing, notably the BJP and Shiv Sena, have, on average, ideal points on the opposite end of the spectrum from those who identify with left-wing parties, such as the Communist Party of India. Individuals who identify with parties generally believed to be in the center or center-left of Indian politics consistently fall in the middle of the ideological spectrum as understood through the ideal point estimates. There is a similarly strong association between the strength of an individual’s ideology (on either end of the ideological spectrum) and their reported level of political engagement. Taken together, these results show that individuals’ views on the identified issue areas map cleanly onto their preferred political parties and their reported real-world political behavior.
In India’s one-party-dominant system, views on the party in power (the BJP) and the issues over which it has long sought to establish ownership (cultural debates over Hindu nationalism) are especially likely to predict an individual’s ideological placement. To probe differences across issue areas, individuals’ latent ideologies were estimated separately for cultural and noncultural nationalist issues and later standardized to facilitate comparison. Earlier in the survey, individuals were asked to describe their levels of support for both the BJP and the Congress Party. A third finding underlines the BJP’s dominance on the national scene: as figure 2 demonstrates, feelings toward the BJP (left panel), but not the Congress Party (right panel), are strongly correlated with an individual’s ideological placement.
Fourth, as shown in figure 3, it is precisely around cultural, Hindu nationalist issues that feelings toward the BJP are most predictive of ideological placement (top left panel) while noncultural issues are the least predictive (bottom left panel). In a related set of analyses, an endorsement from a BJP politician significantly affected respondents’ opinions about cultural issues, but not economic issues; that is, individuals appear to take the BJP’s position into account when evaluating statements promoting Hindu nationalism but not as much when evaluating statements related to economic policy. Further, figure 3 shows that feelings toward the Congress Party are not predictive of ideology measured either on cultural (top right panel) or noncultural (bottom right panel) issues.
Collectively, these findings indicate that ideology matters in the Indian context and that the BJP—and the issues it emphasizes—have an outsized role in determining ideological structure. How do these findings compare to previous explanations of political behavior in India and around the world? Additional analyses suggest that the relationships between ideology and political behavior detailed above still hold even when accounting for variables capturing traditional explanations of politics in India: namely, individuals’ ethnicities (caste category and religion) and their views on patronage politics. Further, the issues commonly used to capture ideological divides in the West (military spending and abortion), as well as the aforementioned standard question that asks individuals to place themselves on a unidimensional left-right scale, do not appear to effectively encapsulate ideological cleavages in the Indian context.[1] These results attest to the explanatory power of political ideology in India while also suggesting that it is structured differently than in other regions.
Assessing Implications for India in 2024 and Beyond
How might these findings shape wider understanding of national political dynamics? First, it would be folly to overlook the central role that political ideology plays in everyday politics. Individuals’ views on state intervention, minority rights, and especially Hindu nationalism hold significant relevance for explaining their political behavior and potentially their votes. Second, these findings point toward the possible crystallization of a one-party-dominant system: while feelings toward the BJP are highly predictive of ideology, feelings toward the Congress Party bear comparatively little relevance. Additional analyses suggest that individuals who identify with no political party or who do not report voting are more likely to have left-wing ideologies. This means that the political left in general, and the Congress Party in particular, has not been sufficiently successful in delineating its issue positions or establishing ownership over salient political topics.
India, along with many other nations in the Global South, has long been thought to lack the urban middle class, state capacity, and established party systems to promote policy-driven politics. The results indicate, to the contrary, that ideology matters in contexts such as India, but that the issues around which it is structured—as well as individuals’ perceptions of where they stand in relation to it—may differ from those that are prevalent elsewhere. In short, ideas do matter in Indian politics; scholars and policymakers have just been looking in the wrong place.
In the months ahead, Carnegie scholars and contributors will be analyzing various dimensions of India’s upcoming election battle—including the role foreign policy plays, the strength of partisan ties, and how technology has reshaped campaigning. Keep up to date with the project at https://carnegieendowment.org/specialprojects/indiaelects2024.
Notes
1Regarding the former, the study finds that ideal points based on “classically Western” issues (abortion and military spending) do little to differentiate Indian political parties from each other. And, to the extent that they do, differences do not map onto understandings of parties’ or their supporters’ ideological positioning. Regarding the latter, we find that ideological self-placement on a seven-point scale from “left” to “right,” as is often elicited in studies on the West, poorly predicts Indian respondents’ ideal point estimates and levels of political engagement.
