Keywords: Electoral polls in emerging/incomplete democracies

The electoral outcomes across the globe last year and this year could lead a researcher or a psephologist into a minefield of contradictory conclusions. For instance, can a study of the electoral outcomes in the recent times in UK suggest that anti-incumbency is still an important factor in UK elections? Can we conclude from the previous electoral victories of Jacob Zuma and Erdogen that anti-incumbency does not matter in democracies? Can we conclude from the last elections in Nepal and Tunisia that good performance does not matter when other considerations are agitating the voter? What conclusions can we draw about the reasons voters chose a candidate or a party? Do local causes matter more or do global causes matter more in elections? And does this help us map the health of Democracy in different societies?

In this paper, we will restrict ourselves to examining the validity of two sets of hypotheses that are quite intriguing. The first one is about the differences in electoral behavior in democracies that are at different stages of maturity. Our hypothesis is that strong ‘anti-incumbency’ factors tend to matter more in mature democracies as we have seen in UK and Indian elections. While ‘pro-incumbency’ probably matter more in new or transitional democracies that are yet to mature; as seen in Bangladesh and Malaysian verdicts. Meanwhile the verdicts from Nepal & Tunisia could be seen as igniting hope and we might see the next stage of transition in Pakistan which for the first time might see a complete cycle of electoral transition without the intervention of Military Junta. At the same time; there are exceptions which have been noticed on both sides of the arguments. And can the AII (Anti-Incumbency Index) developed by Yashwant Deshmukh be used to map the fault-lines of maturity in a democratic system?

While developing and testing AII; our idea is to come to a single currency for anti-incumbency sentiment, which could easily echo the maturity of the democracy in terms of effective electoral verdicts. The parties lose or gain vote share in FPTP system, but it’s the opposition performance and unity that actually decides the impact of the vote gain or loss factor. In short the impact of gain/loss of vote share on the seat share, vis-à-vis opposition unity or fragmentation and the relative turnout of different support bases is the factor that determines the anti-incumbency sentiment. This is exactly what we tried to formulate in order to quantify the AII (Anti Incumbency Index) in FPTP systems. Democratic systems with negative values of AII (Anti Incumbency Index) are the healthy and truly functioning democracies, while the systems showing a positive value of AII tend to be faulty or unstable democracies.