The main feature of most Indian politicians’ political careers is their short duration. It is quite common in any election that the majority of incumbent MPs or MLAs do not serve a second term. In the 2014 General elections, 318 MPs were first-time MPs.
In order to quantify this phenomenon, we are developing a name matching software that identifies possible identical names, in order to facilitate the coding of individual political careers and therefore, track the career trajectory of India’s elected representatives and candidates to state and national elections since 1962. The data is based on the coding of a unique identifying number for every candidate, thanks to TCPD’s tool Surf. Contact us if you are interested in using Surf for other datasets.
If a variable(s) drawn from the TCPD-IID dataset plays an important role in your project (published or unpublished), please use all the suggested citations below:
“Individual Incumbency Dataset, 1962-current”. Trivedi Centre for Political Data, Ashoka University.
“Individual Incumbency Dataset, 1962-current Codebook 2.0”. Trivedi Centre for Political Data, Ashoka University.
Ananay Agarwal, Neelesh Agrawal, Saloni Bhogale, Sudheendra Hangal, Mohit Kumar, Basim U Nissa, and Gilles Verniers. 2022.
POLITICAL CAREER TRACKER
This data interface helps you visualize all candidates contesting an election and enables you to filter these candidates by various categories: first-time contestants, re-running incumbents, turncoats, among others. The data interface also provides information on the number of terms served by MPs and MLAs, and the number of times that candidates have contested.
Political Career Tracker for Candidates in Indian National and State Assembly Elections. Trivedi Centre for Political Data, Ashoka University. 2019-21.