Shaping of the Woman Constituency in Indian Elections: Evidence from the NES Data

This article studies the patterns of women’s vote in the Lok Sabha elections in India in 2024. It draws upon the National Election Studies (NES) data of 2024 and of previous years to address three key questions related to women’s vote in Indian elections. The first is about the extent of Indian women’s political participation in the wake of increased turnout of women voters and the closing of the gender gap. The second question is about the extent of women’s support to the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) as their favoured party. In the absence of conclusive evidence on gender-wise patterns of vote, there have been several tentative and speculative analyses regarding the increasing support of women voters to the BJP both at the regional and national elections, especially since 2014. The article uses the unique window of the NES data sets to understand and decipher women’s support for the BJP and other political parties on a timeline. Finally, from within the confines of the empirical evidence provided by the NES data sets, it also tries to address a rather nuanced question of the arrival of women’s agency in the electoral democracy in India. With the help of the NES data sets, it tries to understand whether women vote mainly as women, prioritizing their gendered identities over other kinds of identities, and whether their voting patterns indicate the arrival of an autonomous women’s constituency in Indian democracy.