Jensenius Indian State Assembly Election data 1961 to 2007

This data covers the election results from the Indian State Assembly elections between 1961 and 2007. The election results are available in PDF format from the website of the Indian Election Commission ([URL] http://eci.nic.in/eci_main1/ElectionStatistics.aspx), but has been been downloaded, scraped and corrected in the case of obvious data entry errors. The data was collated for the author's dissertation titled "Power, Performance and Bias: Evaluating the Electoral Quotas for Scheduled Castes in India" (PhD thesis at the University of California Berkeley (2013)).

The database includes data from all the elections given in the website between the years 1961 and 2007. The part of the reports included in this dataset is the "Detailed Results" at the end of each report, and corrections are made on the basis of the information in the other parts of the reports. There are some remaining mistakes throughout the data due to missingness or errors in the original PDF files. The names of constituencies and candidates were often spelled differently in the various reports and efforts were not made to streamline these names, they are therefore listed they way they were listed in the reports.

The data includes the following variables:

"State_code2001"	This is the code for Indian states given in the Indian Census of 2001
"State_name"		This is the state name given in the report 		
"Year"				The year of the election given in the report
"AC_no"				Number of the Assembly constituency as given in the report
"AC_name"			Name of the Assembly constituency as given in the report
"AC_type"			Whether the Assembly constituency was general (open for all candidates) or reserved for Scheduled Castes (SC) or Scheduled Tribes (ST). This sometimes differs from the type given in the relevant delimitation reports
"Electors"			Number of eligible voters in the constituency
"Voters"			Number of votes cast in the constituency in that election
"Valid_votes"		Number of votes reported as valid (when this was not reported separately the same number is given for voters and valid voters
"Turnout"			The turnout stated in the report (this sometimes differs from Valid_votes/Electors)
"N_cand"			Number of candidates in the constituency as stated in the report
"Margin"			Margin of victory: Vote share of winner - vote share of runner-up
"ENOP_vot"			Effective number of candidates, calculated from the percentages of each candidate in that constituency using the standard formula from Laakso and Taagepera (1979).
"Cand1"				Name of the winning candidate     
"Sex1"     			Sex of winning candidate (M/F)
"Party1"			Party of winning candidate
"Votes1"			Number of votes given to winning candidate
"Percent1"			Percent votes of winning candidate
.
.
"Cand301"    "Sex301"     "Party301"   "Votes301"   "Percent301"

The dataset includes up to 301 candidates per constituency. In a few cases there were more candidates than that in a constituency. First, in a couple instances the reports do not include all the candidate names. Second, errors in the numeric values of the data were identified by adding together the number and percentage votes received by each candidate (which should add up to the total valid votes and 100% respectively). Errors were then manually corrected by research assistants in Excel, and in a couple of instances the number of candidates was so large that the total number of columns exceeded the capacity of the program. Such errors can easily be identified by adding together the percentage votes received by each candidates to see where they do not add up to 100. However, this should have a very minor effect on the calculation of the Effective number of candidates, it does not affect the calculation of turnout, and efforts have been made to ensure that the N_Cand variable is correct.  

In the website there are PDFs going back to elections since 1951, but the data in the reports from the first ten years are misleading because some constituencies were double-member districts (with one general and one reserved seat) while the data is reported as if they were single-member districts. For example, in double member constituencies where voters had to votes, all of the votes are pooled together. The result is that the reported turnouts exceeds 100%. This data therefore needs to be structured differently than the other data, and have not been included in this database. Data for elections after the delimitation in 2008 are available in Excel format in the Election Commission website.