Poll tracker

"Bingo…” said my co-anchor on a national TV network, as soon as we started getting the election trends on 13th of last month. He was referring to the CVoter Exit Poll predictions, which oddly enough were the only one to suggest a Jaya sweep. In fact “Amma Sweeps” was the headline I had posted not only for the exit poll day, but also for the TSI cover story based on our pre-poll survey almost a month back. We dared to stick our necks out, only to realise that everyone else is either projecting a neck-to-neck race or even a DMK victory. Just a day back we were joking that the counting day is on Friday the 13th, and this time either it is going to be horror end for Karunanidhi or for the CVoter Poll. I am glad we are alive.

Back in 2004, when the Indian pollsters got the projections wrong, Bob Worster (founder of MORI, and arguably the most experienced living pollster in UK) very innocently asked me, “Why do you have to predict the seats? I would never do that in FPTP system..” The Same question was tossed to me by Warren Mitofsky (widely respected as “father of exit polls”) in one of the Wapor conferences: “Well Yash, the idea of exit polls is to get the trends right, to get the vote share right. It is easier in presidential form as the task ends there; but in Westminster form of democracy, it is a hara-kiri”.

So, here we are, in a business of hara-kiri. Still we are trying to do something, which we are forbidden to do by the wise men. The science of exit poll or election survey starts and stops at getting the trends based on issues of the times and by assessing the probable “vote” share based on a representative random probability sample. This is far from the exit poll numbers flashed on your TV screen, which screams headlines based only on the projected “seat” share. There is no direct correlation between votes polled and seats won in the First Past The Post System (FPTP) like India. So, the fact is, it’s impossible to predict the exact numbers that a party can win, based on the vote share it probably can poll in a certain election.

But the bigger reasoning is beyond the elections. It’s about the society, the demography, the values, the economy and the constant changes that all these factors are going through. Today the Indian demography is like blind men’s elephant. A blind man with the Elephant’s tail in his hand is describing India as a huge paintbrush and another one with the trunk in his hands explains it like a pillar. Others with the ears or the tusk are as imaginative as it can get. The problem is that the elephant size Indian society needs a complete broader look with all the detailed inspections to describe just the way it is. To cap it all, it is a dynamic society in transition, and if we continue to see it with a mono-spectacle of “market research”; we will never get it right. Not because the science of market research has a limitation. But simply because we just can not copy models of research developed in western societies; and paste it blatantly on India. East is east and west is west. Period.

The democratic electoral verdict is about checks and balances that the public sentiment keeps on the ruling parties. Sometimes this sentiment is confused with the re-election of a certain ruling combination, which is incorrect. Take for example the last Lok Sabha elections in 2009 when UPA came back to power. The results seem to suggest that it was a pro-incumbency verdict. The truth is far from that. The majority of the UPA was thankful to fractured opposition it managed majority of the seats, winning just about one third of the votes. Or for that matter in 2004, when NDA got more votes than UPA, but still got lesser number of seats.

This is so very typical of FPTP system. But it also throws up the fact that the anti-incumbency sentiment was very much working in majority of the elections where incumbent got re-elected, which could not cross a threshold that could have resulted in reducing the ruling party to a minority. Nevertheless it was an anti-incumbent sentiment, waiting to be measured in a proper equation.

The FPTP system, despite of being the easiest and most acceptable form of democracy, has its own sets of problems. The biggest problem being the fact, that there is no direct correlation between the vote share and seats secured by various parties in FPTP system. That is why we have examples of ruling party increasing its vote share in comparison to last general election; still losing the race of majority seats. This happens other way around as well, when a ruling party loses votes but gains seats. This has to do a lot with the opposition unity or the opposition fragmentation; which in turn decided the impact of an anti-incumbent sentiment.

Our idea is to come to a single currency for anti-incumbency sentiment, which could easily echo the maturity of the democracy in terms of effective electoral verdicts. The parties lose or gain vote share in FPTP system, but it’s the opposition performance and unity that actually decides the impact of the vote gain or loss factor. In short the impact of gain/loss of vote share on the seat share, vis-à-vis opposition unity or fragmentation and the relative turnout of different support bases is the factor that determines the anti-incumbency sentiment.

The states with a healthy anti-incumbency index are all healthy or progressive, while those with a positive incumbency index are all either unstable or faulty democracies.  Having socio-economic indicators on the negative side, the struggling states are trying to develop in a self-correction mode. But to have socio-economic indices on negative side and the anti-incumbency index on the positive is a sure shot recipe for democratic disaster. West Bengal is the perfect example of this.

Social and development indicators have a definite co-relation with anti-incumbency. Failed or troubled democracies with low anti-incumbency sentiments have, on an average, poor social and developmental indicators. Many struggling democracies expectedly display low social indices but have high level of anti-incumbency, depicting that there is something wrong in the socio-economic set-up of the state, but the democracy is trying hard to make the roots and cleansing the system in self-correction mode. It may take time but it is happening in these states. Bihar, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh are a good example of this category. Finally, states with overall good social and development indicators form a block in the middle of these two extremes with high but stable anti-incumbency sentiments. Take examples of Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Punjab.

What are surprising though are the electoral results from the so called “stable” economies like Maharashtra and Gujarat. These states seem to have started reacting on anti-incumbency at macro level or on the issues away from local sentiments. But in the last one-decade or so; since the opening up of the economy; they seem to focus more and more on the micro level incumbency despite the fact that these societies have benefited from the open economy in a big way. Does that mean that more the democracy matures on the lines of socio-economic indicators; the more are the chances of its anti-incumbency factors getting more and more micro-focused? The answer seems to be affirmative.

These disparate electoral outcomes could lead a researcher or a psephologist into a minefield of contradictory conclusions. For instance, can a study of the electoral outcomes in the recent times in India suggest that anti-incumbency is always an important factor in Indian elections? Can we conclude from the recent electoral victory of Congress in Assam that anti-incumbency does not matter? Can we conclude from the elections in rest of the states that good performance does not matter when ‘other’ considerations are agitating the voter? What conclusions can we draw about the reasons voters chose a candidate or a party? Do local causes matter more or do global causes matter more in polls?

Well all these questions need constant and continued research. This is the world of dynamic public opinion. This is the world of serious socio-economic research. It’s as vibrant and dynamic as human imagination can go. And yes, this is NOT market research. It’s not people’s preference of a condom or toothpaste. It’s not about something that lasts for few seconds, minutes or hours. It’s about issues that are worth their lives. Public opinion is not just dead heap of stats. It is live; and it is life.

Brian Grosschalk (Chairman of Ipsos) confided to me in 2004 that they never own up the prediction of seats in FPTP. “It’s just crazy...not done” he said when we were comparing UK and Indian models of seats projection. “And when you have a country as heterogeneous as India; is virtually impossible to predict in terms of trends, be it social, economic or political,” he adds.

So, in nutshell, we are in the business of predicting the unpredictable. It is a business of reading the possibilities among the impossible. Yes, I know it’s against the common sense and logic, yet we are doing it passionately for the last 18 years. It has been a roller coaster ride, but that is what makes it exciting to me. I have had my shares of blunders, the biggest ones in MP (1998) and Lok Sabha (2004). But we had the courage to stand up on national TV networks, and say sorry to our viewers. Almost twelve years back Arun Purie told me. “Anyone can get it wrong, but what is more important is that one should know where and why it went wrong and one should have the moral courage to accept it and explain it to the readers or viewers.”

Thank you Mr. Purie, for this precious piece of advice. This is precisely what we did. Stood up with our chins high when we got it wrong on couple of occasions, and continued our relentless research even after getting it right, so that we can get it right again and again and again. For us, the opinion research is not a onetime affair at the time of polling. It is a continuous exercise for next five years when the next round comes in, and we assure you that we will be there with our findings, accumulated over the last five years, week in and week out.

(The author is a TV journalist & founder of CVoter)