The Aam Admi Party (AAP) has secured a simple majority in the 2022 Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) elections, winning 134 wards in the 250-ward corporation. By doing so, it has wrested the (erstwhile) three MCDs from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which won 181 out of the 272 wards in the MCD polls held in 2017. What explains this change of guard in the new-unified MCD? To be sure, the AAP’s performance is below par compared to what most exit polls predicted. Here are three charts that explain the election results in detail.

Dalit voters have ensured AAP’s victory in MCD

This is perhaps the most important factor behind the AAP’s victory in these elections. Out of the 250 wards, 42 were reserved for Scheduled Caste (SC) candidates, 21 out of which were reserved for SC women. AAP has won an overwhelming 36 out of these 42 wards while the BJP has managed to win just six . In the remaining 208 wards, AAP and BJP have won 98 wards each. This clearly shows that the AAP owes its MCD victory to its performance in SC-reserved wards.

Because these wards are earmarked in keeping with their higher share of SC population, higher support in these wards is a good proxy for support among Scheduled Castes. The share of the Dalit population varies from 24% to 69% in the SC-reserved wards with the median population share being 35%. The Median share of SCs in non-reserved wards is 11.7%.

See Chart 1: Party-wise seats in different kinds of wards

The Congress factor in the AAP’s MCD performance

While the AAP has finally managed to wrest MCD from the BJP – it failed to win the 2017 MCD elections despite sweeping the 2015 assembly elections – its performance is relatively underwhelming compared to its 2020 assembly victory when it won 89% of the seats with a vote share of 53.6%. The best way to understand what can be described as a bittersweet victory of sorts for the AAP is to look at the performance of the Congress, as the BJP’s vote share has largely remained unchanged in the 2017 MCD elections, 2020 assembly elections and the 2022 MCD elections. While the Congress managed a vote share of 21% in the 2017 MCD elections, it collapsed to just 4.3% in the 2020 elections. The Congress has managed to push its vote share to 12% in these elections; and the AAP has not seen the kind of consolidation it enjoyed in the 2020 assembly elections when its vote share went past the halfway mark. Whether this represents a larger political phenomenon of weakening of anti-BJP consolidation behind the AAP or is just a reflection of voter loyalties being more divided in what is essentially a hyper-local political contest is an interesting question to pose. One way to answer this question is that the AAP and the BJP enjoy an electoral premium owing to the popularity of Arvind Kejriwal and Narendra Modi as the chief ministerial and prime ministerial faces in the assembly and Lok Sabha elections. The MCD results are perhaps a closer reflection of the core support base of the two parties in the city-state.

See Chart 2: vote share of AAP, BJP and Congress

Did the BJP gain from delimitation?

The newly elected MCD is different from its predecessor in two ways. The erstwhile three municipal bodies (north, east and south) were merged into one and there was a redrawing of ward boundaries that brought down the number of wards from 272 in the previous three MCDs to 250. Because the delimitation exercise was conducted under the aegis of the ministry of home affairs, the AAP has been alleging that it included an element of gerrymandering which refers to redrawing constituency boundaries to further partisan interest. Has the BJP gained from the delimitation process? The simplest way to test this thesis is to look at the seat share to vote share ratio of the BJP in the 2017 and 2022 MCD elections. The seat share to vote share ratio is an effective way to measure of party’s ability to convert votes into seats in a first-past-the-post system. The fact that this ratio has gone down for the BJP suggests that it might not have gained from the delimitation exercise (a far tougher question to answer is whether it would have performed worse without the delimitation). To be sure, the fall in the BJP’s seat share to vote share ratio could be on account of the fact that the MCD elections were a more bipolar contest this time with the Congress losing eight percentage point of its vote share, largely to the AAP.

See Chart 3: Seat share to vote share ratio for BJP, AAP and Congress in 2017 and 2022