Political Career Tracker


Welcome to the Political Career Tracker (PCT)!

Indian politicians tend to have short careers. Often, in a given assembly, more than half of the sitting MPs or MLAs do not serve a consecutive term. As a result, most elected representatives tend to be first-time MPs or MLAs.

The PCT, designed by TCPD, is a visualisation tool that measures this phenomenon and other aspects of Indian politicians' careers. Its interface helps you visualize all candidates contesting a particular 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 the candidates have contested.

Every individual who contested a state or national election since 1962 has been given a unique identification number (PID), thanks to TCPD's tool Surf, a name matching software that identifies and groups possible identical entities in a list of names, regardless of spelling variations. Contact us if you are interested in using Surf for other datasets.

The data used in PCT is freely accessible. We encourage you to look at the raw data and use it for your research or work. If you have any query or notice an error, please write to us. We value your feedback and recommend that you read the documentation before using the tool.


Citation

If you use the data or the Political Career Tracker in any published work, do cite it in the format suggested here: