The Great Transition Towards Populism in Indian Politics: Populist Attitudes and Populist Radical Right (PRR) Voting in the 2019 Indian General Election

While extant research has identified several determinants of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s unprecedented victory in the 2019 general election, they have overlooked the party’s populist radical right (PRR) nature, particularly under the leadership of Narendra Modi. Based on the demand side of PRR voting, this article examines the effect of Indian voters’ populist attitudes on their voting choices for the BJP during the 2019 election. Using binary logistic regression (BLR) and conducting a robustness check, this article identifies that the variable of individuals’ populist attitudes does indeed exert a significant effect on their vote choices for the BJP during the 2019 election. In addition to this main variable, a number of controls that were included in the analysis were also found to be significantly correlated with the dependent variable. In light of the findings, the article proposes some theoretical implications.