Media Exposure and Vote Choice in India, 1996–2019

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between media consumption and voting choices in India in the context of increasing exposure to media, both traditional and new. Using media exposure-related data from the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies’ (CSDS) national election surveys since 1996, it makes a few key assertions. Historically, there has been a positive relationship between traditional news media exposure and voting for the BJP, i.e., the greater the voters’ TV and newspaper consumption, the higher their support for the BJP. With respect to the Congress party, the tendency has generally been the opposite. This pattern now extends to social media exposure as well. However, this impact of media exposure on voting preferences that’s visible at the broad level weakens considerably when slicing the data further by socio-demographic factors. It has been found that the trend of the BJP’s vote share rising with increasing exposure to media is not consistent across the categories of age, education, and caste during many elections. If there is one election, however, that bucked this trend, it was the 2014 Lok Sabha election. The article argues that the BJP was successful in recognizing this and capitalized on it through an extensive media and communications campaign in 2014.