The conventional wisdom that urban voters in India vote less, the authors argue, rests on a shaky empirical foundation: they describe the errors and biases associated with three main methods of estimating urban turnout in India, and note that, even when taken at face value, these measures tell us only about metropolitan India, but not about small towns. Then, they use new data to argue that urbanisation in parliamentary elections since at least 1980 is associated, other things being equal, with lower turnout within but not across states, and that within states, this negative relationship holds for the smaller towns as well as metropolitan cities since at least 1989.
