ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the people's perception of media favouritism and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP's) effective campaign strategy during the 2014 elections. It has a very limited objective: to find out whether media usage and voting preferences were correlated in the 2014 elections. The chapter examines how an individual's exposure to media affects his or her vote choice and political preferences. Most often, citizens learn about politics and the government of the day from the news they watch on television, read in newspapers and come across on social media spaces. The earliest media studies discounted the effect of mass communications on elections, but most recent studies conclude that exposure to media can have a huge influence on election outcomes. As far as the main independent variables are concerned, in the first model, media exposure is positively correlated with the likelihood of voting for the BJP and is statistically significant even after holding socio-demographic factors constant.
