New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2013. xx, 175 pp. (Illus.) US$29.95, paper. ISBN 978-81-321-1044-6.
In his foreword to this useful and compact guide to public opinion surveys, Yogendra Yadav—the popular and media-savvy face of India’s public opinion polls—claims that “opinion polls are well-known and little understood in the Indian public life” (ix, emphasis added). As a user of Indian opinion surveys over the past three decades, I share his hope that this useful survey manual might go some way to combat what he calls “methodological illiteracy about opinion polls” (ix). However, “politicians, media persons and academics,” the three crucial segments of India’s opinion makers, are unlikely to flock to this text. This has to do with the style of the book—more a primer than an evocative introduction—and its inadequate engagement with the fabric of Indian society. Despite their erudition, Kumar and Rai have not quite succeeded in locating opinion polls within the multiple methods of social and economic research currently in vogue.
That the survey of political and social attitudes has made great strides in the Indian media over the past decades is easily seen from the omnipresent forecasts of voting intentions in the run-up to any election, and there is always one round the corner, somewhere, in India. The landmark post-poll survey of the Indian electorate following the 1996 parliamentary elections set off the new trend of supplementing political news with snapshots of opinions and attitudes. Since then polls have gained in sophistication, frequency and variety. There is scarcely a newspaper—English medium or published in one of India’s over twenty vernacular languages—or weekly and monthly magazine which does not cater to this growth industry. However, familiarity is not the same as knowledge, and surveys, imported from their original place of birth in the United States, have often become more of a fashion accessory in the media competition for readership than an aid to deepening the knowledge of the political and social process.
The main strength of the book lies in its meticulous, workman-like delineation of the survey method, an introduction to multistage stratified random sampling which is able to generate a sample rich enough to sustain detailed inquiries into the voting behaviour and political and social attitudes of sub-groups within the vast and culturally diverse Indian electorate. Chapter 3, where the authors focus on Multiple Methods of Measuring Voting Choices and explain why forecasting election results based on exit polls works well in the USA and why it fails in India, is one of the key lessons of this book. This, Kumar and Rai argue, is because in India, opinion polls never developed into an academic endeavour for analyzing elections but are mainly undertaken by market research and polling organizations for predicting seat distribution. Their suggestion for scrupulous attention to the forming of the questionnaire and precautions to take in administering them, and illustrations of how this can be done, are among the other valuable features of this useful book.
Despite these useful features of this book, there are some shortcomings that might detract from its appeal. Opinion surveys are par excellence methods of analyzing individual attitudes. And the voting preference of the individual is the mainstay of electoral democracy. Western students of Indian politics might be sceptical about the feasibility of the extension of these two basic assumptions to Indian society where organic and hierarchic social identities are the most prevalent social networks and where elections, in consequence, often acquire a different character from their Western equivalents. Many Indian readers of opinion surveys also share this scepticism about the veracity of polls. How free is a dalit (castes that were once untouchable and often remain so in practice though the practice of untouchability is a criminal offence) woman to vote, and how free is she to share her opinion and attitude with a stranger in a survey format? The fact of the matter is that such people vote copiously and strategically, but what makes this possible does not form part of the account of Kumar and Rai. The underlying processes that affect polling should have been highlighted more fully, particularly because this has been the focus of considerable research. The authors would have done well to delve into the scholarly attention devoted to these issues by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, to which they belong and which has done the pioneering work in this field. For an answer to the sociology of voting behaviour, such as, for example, whether voting decisions are influenced by “political rather than primordial group considerations,” one can turn to D.L. Sheth’s “Political Development of the Electorate” (15) and a series of other excellent essays in D.L. Sheth, ed., Citizens and Parties: Aspects of Competitive Politics in India (Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1975).
Survey research is not the only method of studying voting behaviour empirically. The authors could have dwelt on why ecological correlations, which analyze voting behaviour in terms of areas rather than individuals as units of analysis, has not caught on in India despite the availability of good census data and the matching of constituency units with their socio-economic composition. Similarly, the authors would have done well to refer to the use of multiple methods which makes it possible for survey researchers to look at their findings from other angles such as discourse analysis, aggregate data and path dependency that open the door to the currently popular evolutionary institutionalism, as supplementary methods that help survey researchers get more out of their material.
On the whole, the authors should be complimented for providing a useful link between the consumers of survey data and the producers of this vital tool of social and political research. They have paved the way for the deepening of the application of survey research to electoral analysis in the social and political context of non-Western societies.
Subrata K. Mitra
Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany
pp. 879-881