A Dataset of Geolocated Villages and Gram Panchayat Election Candidates in Uttar Pradesh

Village Council or Gram Panchayat (henceforth, Panchayat) elections provide highly localized political shocks, making them suitable to answer various research questions in a causal framework. We collect data for Panchayat elections held in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh for the years 2021 and 2015. While election candidates’ data are openly available on Uttar Pradesh State Election Commision website, they are not easily accessible. Moreover, the villages are not geolocated. This motivated us to scrape the state website to obtain the data, and geolocate it to allow us to match them with our social media data consisting of the user's activity and their geo-location. These data are a valuable resource for researchers interested in questions related to political economy in the Developing World. Link to the Github repository with the code and data can be found here.