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With just a couple of weeks to the end of the year, seven Indian states elected new governments. Nine of them are due to elect new governments through 2023. At a time like this, one cannot choose to ignore the relevance of a book like ‘Who Moved My Vote? Digging Through Indian Electoral Data’.
Published by Westland, the book is authored by Yugank Goyal who teaches public policy at FLAME University, Pune and Arun Kumar Kaushik, who teaches economics at OP Jindal Global University. No prizes for guessing what the book is about. True to their profession, the two academics have gone through and sifted large datasets, visualised them as lines and bars, and explained the electoral story in almost simple vocabulary.
A political primer
Is the book thought-provoking? For sure. Even though you would know how electoral systems work, it may not often occur to you that an elected representative is not exactly favoured by a majority of the voters in a constituency. It aptly says, “Majority does not win. Plurality does. This is the edifice of our democracy,” explaining the flaws of the first-past-the-post (FTFP) system. A lot of it that you read in the initial parts of this book may not be alien to you. You would have read them in your civics or political science books. However, here, the concepts are explained in a way that is easy to decipher.
It then moves on to have separate chapters on the politics and voting patterns in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Kerala. There is a lot of history explained in a few pages, taking you through the rise and fall of various political parties in these states over years. In a span of an hour or two, you would know Bihar’s caste politics, the rise of Lalu Prasad Yadav and Nitish Kumar and the various parties of Uttar Pradesh from the Indian National Congress to Samajwadi Party to the incumbent BJP (which has a separate chapter on itself). It also tells you how the voters in West Bengal did not exactly favour the left. Wonder how? You should read the book to find that out.
Towards the end, it further delves deeper into the FTFP system and the Proportional Representational system, looking at the pros and cons of both. There is a rather interesting chapter on how the history of coalition politics and how the declining popularity of the Congress party played a role in making it popular. The book ends with calling for more electoral reforms to make the system stronger.
Data heavy
This book is something that political aficionados and researchers must not miss. That being said, it is not exactly your regular leisure read. Books on data can be heavy for some. Off late, a few of them barred the exception. Sadly, ‘Who moved my vote’ does not make the cut to fall into that category. Humanising and anecdotally explaining data would have certainly helped make this very important book an interesting read. However, a regular reader is pushed to a state of information overload with a series of graphs, so you often find yourself skipping a couple of paragraphs to move to the graph to find out what it says.
The authors chose to stick to the traditional bar and line graphs to visualise most of the data. These are quite safe bets when it comes to data visualisation. However, they did not work quite well everywhere. For instance, in graphs with more than one line, you find yourself trying to differentiate between various shades of grey, trying to make sense of it. Also, one would vividly remember trying to understand the percentage of state-wise voter turnout over the last four parliamentary elections through a horizontal, ten-line long grouped bar graph.
Check it out on Amazon.
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