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Business News/ Politics / Policy/  What Maharashtra wants | Part VI
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What Maharashtra wants | Part VI

Election Metrics analyses in charts voting patterns of the rich, poor and the BPL ahead of Maharashtra assembly elections

The rich don’t bother about agricultural handouts or minimum support prices or loan waivers, while these are high on the agenda of the poor. Photo: Indranil Bhoumik/MintPremium
The rich don’t bother about agricultural handouts or minimum support prices or loan waivers, while these are high on the agenda of the poor. Photo: Indranil Bhoumik/Mint

The Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), in association with Daksh, a not-for-profit organization, has conducted a survey of over 20,000 respondents across all the constituencies of Maharashtra, which elects a new legislative assembly on 15 October.

The survey collects demographic information of respondents, along with their ratings on the relative importance of various issues in the lead-up to the election. Respondents have also rated the performance of their sitting legislators on these issues in the past five years. This is in line with similar surveys done by ADR and Daksh in the lead-up to the Lok Sabha election earlier this year, and other state elections prior to that.

What excites Election Metrics is that this data can be used to compare and contrast the priorities accorded by voters belonging to different classes to different sets of issues. Every day, till the day of the Maharashtra elections, we will pick two different groups of voters in the state, and understand the relative importance of different factors for them.

The data for the following visualization comes from the ADR-Daksh survey, but has been normalized and scaled so that it is easily comparable. Each column represents the priorities given by the two groups (mentioned below) for different issues. The vertical distance between two issues in a column is representative of the relative preference for the group for one issue over another.

RICH VS POOR

Do the rich and the poor vote differently? Do they have different sets of priorities? Using data from the ADR-Daksh survey, we analyse and compare their priorities. The survey asks people to classify themselves according to socio-economic status. In the following chart, we compare the priorities of voters who classify themselves as either “rich" or “upper middle class" to those who classify themselves as “poor" or “below poverty line" (BPL).

The surprising part is the high importance given to traffic and pedestrian rights among the poor—factors that are somewhere in the middle for the rich. It is also interesting to note that the rich are more concerned about women’s security, inflation (the so-called “tax on the poor"), defence, schools and drinking water.

POOR VS THE BPL

The ADR-Daksh survey asked voters to classify themselves on socio-economic criteria. Among other choices, some voters described themselves as BPL while others described themselves as being merely “poor". Is there any difference in the political choices between these two groups? How do the poor differ in their priorities compared to those below the poverty line?

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Published: 14 Oct 2014, 10:10 AM IST
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