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Pre-election alliances have long figured prominently in Indian elections. Has the politics surrounding pre-election alliances changed with the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)? This article analyzes patterns of election alliance formation across India's states and examines the extent to which these alliances affected the outcome of the 2019 election. It finds that patterns of alliance formation in the run-up to the 2019 election did not, on the whole, differ noticeably from prior elections. Though the BJP's strong performance muted the impact of some key alliances, election alliances nevertheless had a perceptible impact on the final allocation of seats and appear to have influenced voting behaviour largely as anticipated.

Are certain kinds of candidates more likely to do better in elections than others? Using a unique dataset on the characteristics of candidates in elections in the north Indian state of Haryana, this study finds that certain candidate characteristics are associated with greater vote shares.

Strategic voting is thought to underlie Duverger's Law and lead to two-party outcomes in single-member district plurality (SMDP) systems. We examine the extent of strategic voting in the world's most populous democracy, India, where frequent exceptions to Duverger's Law have long puzzled political scientists. Using an original voter survey from the 2017 Uttar Pradesh state election, we find extremely low rates of strategic voting. Why? We show that the vast majority of respondents believe that their preferred party is likely to win in their constituency. For most voters, their partisan preferences overwhelmingly predict their beliefs about which party will win. Their election forecasts correspond to objective electoral outcomes only with respect to parties that they like less.