Impact of Development Issues on Voting Behaviour: A Study of Sultanganj Assembly Constituency

Although development has become the primary language of electoral competition in India, constituency-level data on voting behavior concerning infrastructure, education, employment, welfare, and perceived government performance is still scarce. This study focuses on 384 respondents from Sultanganj Assembly Constituency with the supplied respondent-level master chart. Descriptive analysis, reliability, Spearman correlations, chi-square, exploratory OLS, and binary logistic regressions were used. Each respondent viewed development as important, with 50.3% responding that they agreed and 49.7% responding that they strongly agreed; development scored an average of 4.50 on a 5-point Likert Scale. Development showed a positive correlation with the exploratory voting-behavior score (rho =.162, p =.001), and government performance and developmental initiatives index showed a stronger correlation (rho =.225, p<.001). In the multivariate analysis, development remained a positive, yet small, predictor (beta=.101, p=.037). Government-development evaluation was a stronger predictor (beta=.248, p<.001). However, development and government-development evaluation could not explain the switching of alliances for the 2020-2025 period. While development is important in the performance evaluation of government and electoral reasoning, it does not provide an explanation for the observed switching of parties in this sample. This is important to note as we should not confuse the presence of the pro- development attitude in the electorate with the realignment of the electorate in the constrained situation of the response distribution.