Number Theory: Outliers within the constituencies in Lok Sabha elections
When there is a nationally dominant party, as there was in 2014 and 2019, assembly constituencies within a parliamentary constituencies largely vote similarly .
Polling for the Lok Sabha elections is all but over. One of the narratives that has found traction from anecdotal accounts is that it is a seat-by-seat election. Whether or not this is true will only be known on June 4. Until then, past data can be used to answer a more interesting question: How coherent are parliamentary constituencies (PCs) when it comes to voting in Lok Sabha elections? Simply speaking, do parts of a PC vote differently from the overall result in the PC? The best way to answer this question is to break down PC-wise results at the assembly constituency (AC) level and see whether the winner in any constituent AC is different from that in the PC. HT has used AC-wise data on Lok Sabha elections from Trivedi Center for Political Data (TCPD) – it has this data from 1999 Lok Sabha elections onwards – to tackle this question. Here is what the data shows.
