Do political manifestos really influence voters?

As the race towards the elections has started heating up, and major political parties have made their manifestos public, politicians are engaging in charged debates and discussions around these poll promises. How effective these documents are remains an unanswered question.

According to political analyst Sandeep Shastri, the utility of manifestos in influencing public favour towards a party has long been under debate. “Empirical evidence is still required to suggest citizens vote on the basis of manifestos, or even largely based on such documents,” he says.

In recent years, a welcome change, Haveri-based researcher Arun Joladakudligi says, is that such documents have garnered more attention than usual. “In the past, apart from academic circles, such manifestos would not matter to the public,” he says.

As a result of this awareness, there is greater hesitancy among political parties to make outlandish promises.

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Product designer Bharath Surendra reasons that although he knows that politicians may not deliver on all of their promises the manifesto is a single document that records a party’s intentions. “It is a trickle-down effect. Even if all that is on the agenda is not executed, some promises will be delivered on,” he says. Beyond political and social ideologies, manifestos influence his voting in this way.

“For me, the manifesto is a way to track what the government is doing after it is elected as well,” he says. In fact, in North America and Europe, manifestos are routinely used to document the performance of governments statistically. In India, this exercise is absent at the macro level.

Kaveramma, a pourakarmika in Bengaluru, explains that the list of promises in the manifesto rarely reaches them. Even when this information is available, Kaveramma does not find herself believing in such commitments. “Politicians will say anything to get votes,” she says.

Decision to vote

The decision to vote depends on a complex set of criteria, not always dependent on what the manifestos contain. For Joladakudligi, past performance is a better and more reliable metric. The public too is more focused on the work they have witnessed over the past five years, apart from caste considerations and generational voting patterns.

Manogna Murari, a social media manager based in Bengaluru, explains that manifestos can be unpredictable documents to put trust in as they are often based on trending topics as opposed to what a constituency actually needs.

Correspondingly, voters from marginalised socio-economic backgrounds were found to favour parties or candidates that had floated and fulfilled pro-poor economic and welfare programmes such as loan waivers or ration schemes.

Combined with discussions on the ground about reliability and accessibility, campaign promises and generational political allegiances impact how communities vote. For instance, Govind, a cut fruit seller who lives in Shantinagar, says that it is such voting patterns that empower them to approach a politician in case there is trouble or a need in the neighbourhood. “There is a collective bargaining power that comes with these age-old associations,” he says.

While this is true of past polling, adherence to family voting patterns has been on the decline in the recent past. “Many studies have found that women and the young, who were thought to vote according to family patterns, do not necessarily follow the family’s voting patterns,” says Shastri.

Kaveramma’s daughters, for instance, are free of any influence and vote according to the information they glean from TV news content, social media and conversations with friends.

At the end of the day, Shastri adds that it is a basket of different factors that influence voting, including how a manifesto is constructed. “At the end of the day, perceptions matter. A politician once told me, "I will win because people think I am honest," he concludes.