Abstract
There has been a data revolution in the study of Indian politics in recent years. Indian politics has always been a fascinating field, in comparative perspective and in its own right. Accounts of fieldwork in India have challenged and informed discussions about democracy in the developing world for decades. Since the 1990s, the National Election Studies conducted by Lokniti, CSDS, have enabled informed quantitative analyses of political patterns across the country. More recently, technological innovations and the increasing availability of online data sources have opened the door to new ways of studying Indian politics quantitatively. Scholars can now create and merge a wide range of large-scale datasets, making it possible to establish new empirical trends, fact check commonly held political narratives and test hypotheses developed in other democratic contexts.