From Identity to Incentives: Rethinking Voting Behaviour in Contemporary India

The study of voting behaviour in India has long been organised around a foundational empirical observation: that caste, religion, and community identity are the primary determinants of electoral choice, operating through bloc mobilization, candidate selection, and the calculation of which party most credibly represents one's community interests. This identity-centred framework has never been without critics, and the critique has intensified in the period since 2014, when the BJP's combination of Hindu nationalist identity politics with extensive welfare scheme delivery — and its success in attracting significant support from communities that had historically supported Congress or regional parties — appeared to signal a shift in the mechanisms of electoral choice. This paper examines the theoretical and empirical case for a transition from identity-based to incentive-based voting behaviour in contemporary India, argues that the binary is analytically misleading, and develops an integrated framework in which identity and incentives are co-constitutive rather than competing explanations. The BJP's electoral success is best understood as a fusion of Hindu identity mobilization with welfare delivery in a model that simultaneously activates identity commitment and provides material incentives — a combination that is more electorally potent than either dimension alone. The paper draws on Chandra's ethnic party theory, the economic voting literature, CSDS post-poll survey data, and the political economy of the BJP's "new welfare nationalism" to develop this argument, and concludes with implications for Indian democratic theory.